Furious Aussies are still reeling from yesterday’s major Optus outage, which saw 10 million people left without service for more than nine hours.
An increasing number of stories are emerging of just how significantly people were impacted by Wednesday’s failure – with young Aussies in particular not holding back their fury at the telco provider.
Young people have taken to social media to call out the outage, demanding compensation and even threatening to sue Optus in the wake of the disaster.
Yoga teacher, Eve, claims she was left $1000 out-of-pocket after she missed her flight due to not being able to book an Uber to the airport.
“My home network is also on Optus, so I had to a cafe to get Wi-Fi and they were on Optus, so I had to walk to another cafe and use their Wi-Fi. They weren’t happy about it and I was like ‘Look, I’ve got a flight to catch and I can’t order an Uber right now’,” she said in a TikTok video.
Even after finding an internet connection, Eve still wasn’t able to book a ride and ended up driving herself to the airport and parking in long-term parking, something she had never done before.
“The long-term car park is ages away from their airport, so I had to get on this shuttle bus. And this shuttle bus was the slowest bus I have ever been on in my life and it went to every single carpark on the way here,” she said.
“I know that sounds ignorant but I have never had to use long-term parking before, so I just thought it would go straight there. Anyway, I missed my flight.”
She was able to book another flight for later that day, but now claims “Optus owes me $1000”.
However, Optus chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin that the company would not be paying back customers affected by the national outage, claiming it is because most would get “less than $2” in compensation.
Eve is far from the only person calling for Optus to pay up.
A young body builder, who goes by ABOM on TikTok, threatened to sue the company if they didn’t provide compensation.
“If you’re in Optus and you live in Australia. Bro, if I’m not getting paid for this sh*t, I’m going to sue them,” he said during Wednesday’s outage.
“It has been like over five hours, six hours, I can’t leave the house. I am literally under house arrest because I have no network. It is literally SOS since like 8am.
He claimed this is not the first time he has had issues with Optus, branding the situation “cooked” and telling the telco to “sort your sh*t out bro.”
TikToker Joseph Mugisha is also calling for compensation, saying that if the company “isn’t talking about some sort of money right now” then he doesn’t want to hear it.
He said he could “understand” if the outage was between half an hour and two hours, but “damn near a whole day” was too much.
“Optus better come out with some substantial compensation for every customer. There is no other way,” he said, adding in the caption that he would “let it slide” if they sent him $3500.
Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said it was more than reasonable that people expected a refund and urged businesses to keep their receipts to show proof of economic loss.
“Australians expect providers to compensate them when things go wrong and I think that’s reasonable,” Ms Rowland told the ABC.
“There is a reasonable expectation from Australians that if they are done wrong, if there is an outage of this nature that causes them to suffer loss in some way – be that economic or otherwise – that corporations will do the right thing by them.”
On Thursday, the federal government announced it was launching an official inquiry to look into how it can better assist large telecommunications providers during major disruptions.
In a separate probe, the Australian Media and Communications Authority will look into claims Optus breached compliance rules around emergency calls after it was reported people were unable to dial triple-0 on their landlines.
Optus’ vice president of regulatory and public affairs Andrew Sheridan released an apology to customers following the announcement, and said the company would fully co-operate with investigations.
“As a critical infrastructure provider, we understand how important it is to ensure continuity of service and any lessons learnt are likely to be helpful for both Optus and others in our industry,” Mr Sheridan wrote in a statement.
“We value our customers’ loyalty, and are looking at ways to say ‘thank you’.”