Optus dials up $100 Christmas data gift for its outage victims

Optus has moved to cauterise reputational damage from the nation’s largest telco network failure by offering customers $100 worth of free data.

Optus chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin.

Embattled telco Optus has ­offered $100 of free data to millions of customers after blaming Wednesday’s catastrophic collapse of its mobile, broadband and landline services on an unexplained network “event” that triggered a cascading failure across multiple systems.

But it has conceded that it still remains in the dark about what caused the country’s largest ever telecommunications failure.

In a bid to cauterise reputational damage, and with the company now facing a potential exodus of business and government customers and the blowtorch of multiple government-led inquiries, Optus on Thursday ­offered limited reparation to affected customers in the form of extra data over the Christmas holiday period.

Communications Minister Michelle Rowland, who has launched an inquiry to demand answers from the telco as to how the outage occurred, said it would be up to customers to decide whether the offer was fair.

Following demands for full disclosure on why 10 million customers were offline for 12 hours, chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin on Thursday conceded the company had failed to identity the exact cause of the unprecedented nationwide outage.

“Our focus was on restoring services and now our focus is on understanding at the deepest level exactly what happened, in what sequence that allowed a fairly redundant and robust network to not stand up on a day like (Wednesday),” Ms Bayer Rosmarin told The Australian.

“Like most major global telecommunications networks, our network is designed with multiple layers of fallback and redundancy. And at the heart of this is a modern, intelligent router network that we’ve developed with the world’s leading vendors.

“We worked very hard and as fast as we could to restore that service as a priority. Our teams of engineers are now doing a detailed investigation so we thoroughly understand what occurred.

Communications Minister Michelle Rowland is demanding answers from Optus after launching a government-led inquiry into the nation’s largest telecommunications network failure. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

“We know that there is nothing we can do to make up for yesterday and what customers want most is for our network to work all the time – which is our No.1 priority – but we also want to acknowledge their patience and loyalty by giving them additional data to help during the holidays, when so many people consume more data with friends and family,” she said.

Regulators have warned the company could be liable for a significant compensation bill which the small business lobby claimed could run into “the billions”.

The country’s second-largest telco now faces a Senate inquiry, a regulatory investigation by the telecommunications watchdog and a government-led probe initiated by Ms Rowland.

Ms Bayer Rosmarin said the company would co-operate fully with the government inquiry.

Former NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian, now an Optus executive, said: “We are here to hear the concerns any business may have but this is our gesture of saying thank you for the patience and frustration they experienced.”

Ms Rowland confirmed the government had initiated an inquiry into what has been labelled an “unprecedented” failure in the nation’s telecommunications infrastructure.

“Since the outage was first reported, the government has been clear about our expectations that Optus provide timely and accurate advice to impacted customers,” she said in a statement provided to The Australian.

“We acknowledge the offer that has been put out today. Australians are reasonable people, and ultimately Optus customers will be the best judge on whether the company’s response properly compensates them for the loss of services they experienced.

“I strongly encourage small business customers who were uniquely impacted by the outage to speak with their account managers. Connectivity is absolutely essential for Australian consumers and businesses, and the ­impacts of this outage were particularly concerning.

“Primarily, this is about the lessons learnt and to ensure that the industry overall can make the improvements necessary to mitigate what has happened here from happening again in the future.

Terms of reference for the inquiry were yet to be determined but the minister said the inquiry would be asked for practical recommendations to ensure it couldn’t happen again.

Business Council of Australia chief executive Bran Black said it was imperative that the cause of the fault was identified. “It’s important to uncover exactly what happened and take action to ensure it doesn’t happen again,” Mr Black said. “Optus has rightly apologised, they are taking steps to address this issue, and they are now looking at options to support their customers.”

But the Council of Small Business Organisations Australia on Thursday claimed a compensation bill for small businesses ­affected by the outage could run into billions of dollars.

“I think a lot of forensics will need to come through, and that flow-on impact will be hard to model at this point, but certainly if you look at the economy-wide impact that occurs during public holiday shutdowns, the impact on the economy is often in the billions,” COSBOA chief executive Luke Achterstraat said. “So it’s certainly not out of the question to think the overall impact on the economy could be in the billions.”

Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman Cynthia Gebert confirmed compensation would be on the cards. Though businesses are not protected by any overarching protections in the current telecommunications regulation environ­ment, Ms Gebert said her role was to assist businesses to come to a resolution with Optus based on what the “right thing to do is under the circumstances”.

“There will be clear economic losses; some would have suffered in not being able to trade; for ­others it’ll be the stress, the time, the inconvenience they may seek com­pensation for,” she said.

Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry chief Andrew McKellar described Optus’s response to the incident as a “clown show” with up to 400,000 business customers affected.

“Without internet connectivity, many businesses weren‘t able to receive or process payments, weren’t able to trade, and therefore weren’t able to open,” he said.