Analysis: The trust in Australian telco giant Optus was disconnected along with its internet yesterday, writes Aziz Al Sa’afin.
Yesterday’s Optus outage was the biggest internet blackout Australia has ever experienced – more than 10 million people and 400,000 businesses were disconnected for almost 14 hours.
Some might roll their eyes about not being able to connect to the internet, but this was so much more than that.
We're talking about small businesses being forced to shut down because they couldn't trade. We're talking about hospital services being crippled across an entire country. We're talking about people unable to access their own money because banks couldn't function.
To make matters worse, emergency services were impacted. Firefighters are currently battling real fires on the frontlines, and this was not a fire they needed to fight yesterday. Optus landlines couldn't even reach Triple Zero, Australia's equivalent of 111.
The network went down at around 4am Eastern Time, and it took the company hours to respond.
Engineers hadn't even diagnosed the problem by midday yesterday, and it was only at 12.15pm that the telco's CEO, Kelly Bayer Rosmarin, addressed the concerns.
By that point, her frontline store staff were being verbally abused by customers left and right because they couldn't answer the question printed on their signs above their doors: "How can we help?"
Brand suffers further damage
Trains and even hospitals were affected this morning. (Source: 1News)
This latest issue comes just a year after Optus was engulfed in a massive data breach, one that was labelled the most serious privacy breach in Australia’s history.
The hack was incredibly damaging for the Optus brand, and the company has worked to rebuild that over the past year. Now, that reputation is tarnished again.
And it goes from bad to worse – Optus has also said it has no plans to reimburse customers for the outage.
Rosmarin said this was because most customers would get “less than $2” in compensation.
It is not clear how $2 would be equivalent to a whole day’s worth of trade lost for a business. And certainly, no value can ever be placed on trust.
There has also been no explanation as to why the outage happened in the first place. As Rosmarin pointed out, the only information we have to go on is that it was a "deep technical fault”.
While it won't change what took place yesterday, customers still deserve to know why this happened – and know steps are being taken to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
Until then, trust in the company is disconnected, much like its service was.
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