Optus customers defect to Telstra after outage
Optus customers have started making the switch to Telstra following the national outage last week that affected about 10 million users.
Telstra has gained new customers following the 14-hour Optus outage last week, the nation’s biggest telco has confirmed.
But the exact number of disgruntled customers defecting from Optus this time around was yet to be determined.
Speaking at the annual investor day, Telstra chief executive Vicki Brady said it was a similar experience to last year’s Optus hack.
“Post last week’s outage, yes, we’ve seen some increase in acquisition of customers,” she said.
“There’s been some speculation about how large that could be, and I would just go back to the cyber breach last year … we saw elevated acquisition levels for around a six-week period.
“But at the end of the day, there wasn’t a significant shift in share in the market.”
The outage affected about 10 million Optus customers – including hospitals and businesses –and came after the company suffered the worst cyber breach in Australian history last year.
The nationwide outage was blamed on changes to “routing information” following a software upgrade.
“At around 4.05am Wednesday morning, the Optus network received changes to routing information from an international peering network following a routine software upgrade,” Optus said in a statement on Monday.
“There routing information changes propagated through multiple layers in our network and exceeded preset safety levels on key routers which could not handle these.”
It resulted in routers disconnecting from the Optus IP Core network to protect themselves, so they had to be physically reconnected or rebooted, which required “the dispatch of people across a number of sites in Australia”.
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