‘It’s a bit much’: Small business owner hits back at Optus CEO after outage debacle

As she rushed to clean up the massive outage, Optus boss Kelly Bayer Rosmarin managed to make the situation even worse.

The fallout from the Optus outage has gone from bad to worse, with comments the telco’s chief executive made about a small business affected by the blackout prompting an accusation that she’s “out of touch”.

CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin started an apology tour hours after the telecommunication provider’s network first went black on Wednesday, promising to thank customers for their patience.

But she has been accused of attempting to “mock” and “humiliate” a Sydney barber shop, which was one of 400,000 businesses affected by the outage.

Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin has come under fire for “out of touch” comments she made about a Sydney barbershop. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Damian Shaw

“I’m disappointed that a barber couldn’t do haircuts today,” Ms Bayer Rosmarin said in an interview with 9 News on Wednesday.

“That seems like one of the few things you can do without connectivity.”

The comment was lashed online, with Aussies saying the CEO “missed the whole point” of the barber’s frustrations with the outage.

One person surmised the general consensus: “Oh boy. How out of touch can you be?”

Now the barber she was talking about has snapped back at the telco boss.

“It’s a bit much for her to throw me under the bus when she can’t even do her job,” Jake Azar, manager of North Sydney Barbers, told news.com.au.

“If she does her job, I can do my job. But I can’t do my job if she’s incapable of doing her job.”

He said if Optus had done “anything differently” on Wednesday, “I wouldn’t have had to close for the day”.

Barber and manager of North Sydney Barbers Jake Azar had to close his business early on Wednesday due to the catastrophic Optus service outage. Picture: Georgina Noack

Mr Azar said he could tell something was wrong as soon as he tried to fire up the computer, EFTPOS, and music in his shop to open at 9am.

He closed his doors by 12pm, but not before about a dozen clients took advantage of the EFTPOS blackout.

“The nearby Commonwealth Bank is closed for construction, so some people said they’d go to another ATM around the corner to get cash out. But they never came back,” he said.

Mr Azar said he had to turn about 10 customers away when he closed early. Combined with the customers who didn’t pay for his service, that meant the loss of hundreds of dollars.

“I know people lost out big time, (the outage) affected a lot of people,” he added.

“I had a bit of a laugh about what she said, but she needs to take more responsibility.

“If I do a bad haircut, I have to own that and fix it. If I can do that, she can do that on her end instead of bagging customers.”

He said after all of the drama – and last year’s data leak scandal – he’s “going to Telstra”.

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Mr Azar said the barber shop lost hundreds of dollars due to the outage. Picture: Georgina Noack

The mass outage meant businesses that used the telecommunications giant were without phone lines, internet services, and couldn’t complete transactions through EFTPOS machines.

It took at least 14 hours to bring systems back online but, more than a day later, Optus was still yet to reveal the root cause of the blackout.

Optus has apologised for the chaos the outage caused, and announced late on Thursday that it would compensate its consumer and small business customers with 200GB of extra data. That data will need to be activated by the end of the year.

“We’re going to thank our customers for their patience and loyalty by giving them additional data for a couple of months,” Ms Bayer Rosmarin said in an interview with news.com.au on Thursday.

She explained Wednesday’s outage was caused by a “cascading failure that resulted in the shutdown of our services” and that it “took time” for Optus to reboot its service.

“Of course we worked as hard and fast as we possibly could,” Ms Bayer Rosmarin said. “We have a team of network engineers and were able to begin restoring services from about noon.

“The bottom line is, we wish we could have done something different today and we know there is nothing we can do to make up for it.

“So we hope our customers appreciate that we really tried to do something valuable for them.”

Anne Nalder, founder and CEO of the Small Business Association of Australia, blasted what she called Optus’s “ridiculous” response.

Ms Nalder said Optus’s reason for rejecting more significant compensation was “ludicrous” and would “annoy a lot of people”.

“That’s the most ridiculous thing on the planet,” she told news.com.au.

“How can you say that’s all you’ll get if you’ve lost staff wages, there’s no productivity going on? Goes to show you how out of touch she is with the real world. Any CEO saying that should be sacked.”

Millions of Aussies were thrown into chaos when Optus’ network suffered a critical outage. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Flavio Brancaleone

She said the outage had created enormous damages, especially for small businesses who closed but will still need to pay staff wages despite the lost productivity.

“It’ll be a huge loss bill. I wouldn’t be surprised it if ran into the billions, because you’re talking about half of Australia being affected by this,” Ms Nalder said.

“They (Optus) need to offer compensation, full stop. This business about upgrades and ‘all sorts of things can happen’, we know things can happen but her excuses are feeble and it’s not good enough. And I don’t think anyone is going to accept it.”

Mr Azar said he would “love to see compensation” for the disruption to his business but, more than that, he wanted to see Optus take responsibility for their “mess up”.

He and Ms Nalder also urged against speeding away to a cashless society, unless we have backups or solutions in place to these situations in the future.

“I think we have to review the push to go cashless, because we have to have a Plan A, which means when technology’s working, and we have to have a Plan B when it’s not working,” Ms Nalder said.

“Whether that’s through tech itself, energy failure, we have to have a backup plan or we risk bankrupting a country if something like this happens again, and for longer.”

Originally published as ‘It’s a bit much’: Small business owner hits back at Optus CEO after outage debacle