Optus outage: Is this a good time to switch? And can I get compensation?

Millions of Optus customers in Australia were left without phone and internet services after the telco giant’s network dropped out from about 4am on Wednesday.

Unable to make or receive calls for at least nine hours, hospitals, schools, financial institutions and government departments were among those affected, along with some people’s ability to call triple zero.

Wednesday’s outage occurred a year after the Singaporean-owned telco was subjected to a cyber-attack that compromised the personal data of up to 9.8 million customers.

People queued outside the stores of other telco providers, while others gathered at fast food restaurants and public libraries in search of wifi.

The federal communications minister, Michelle Rowland, said Optus customers were experiencing a “high level of anxiety and frustration” and suggested some might leave the company.

Optus has apologised to customers and said at 5.30pm on Wednesday that services had been restored.

But if you were caught up in the outage, here’s what you can do and what might happen next.

Shop around

The Optus chief executive was asked on 3AW radio on Wednesday if she expected an “exodus” of customers. Kelly Bayer Rosmarin was very sorry for customers but pointed out that nationwide outages were “highly unusual”.

“I believe at Optus that we are customer champions and we go to great lengths to give our customers great value for money, excellent service and coverage and unique features they can’t get anywhere else,” she said.

Mariam Gabaji, a telco expert at the financial comparison site Finder, said the Optus outage was “unfortunate” but it was a good opportunity to explore other phone and internet plans to get best value for money.

Gabaji said people wanting to switch mobile phone plans should check whether they were using all the data they’d signed up for, as well as the coverage offered by the networks that the different providers use.

Gabaji encouraged people to shop around for broadband or NBN home internet packages that could be better value. As an example, she pointed to NBN 50 – the most common internet plan in Australia.

She said there was a $450 difference in price between the cheapest NBN 50 plan and the most expensive, with the less expensive option supplied by a smaller provider and the costlier option supplied by one of the big telcos.

Refunds and compensation

The Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman advised affected customers to contact them if they’d already contacted Optus and were unhappy with the response.

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The ombudsman, which mediates disputes between the telco industry and customers, said it could also forward complaints to Optus if people had not yet contacted the company or were unable to contact it.

The ombudsman said it could help affected customers with refunds for the time they had not been able to use their internet or phone services, as well as compensation schemes and any disputes about contracts.

However, the University of Sydney’s chair of market regulation and private law, Prof Yane Svetiev, said it was too early to say whether customers would be eligible for compensation.

“It’s not just that because people have had interruptions they will be automatically entitled to some sort of redress,” he said. “A lot will depend on the reason for the interruption, which is not really understood as yet.”

Svetiev said most telco companies put terms in their contracts that said they didn’t “actually guarantee continuous service” because there were “factors outside of their control” that could cause disruptions.

“It depends whether Optus has done everything a reasonable, competent provider of that service would have done, and done it in a timely way,” he said.

Parliamentary inquiry

The Greens have called for a federal parliamentary inquiry to examine what went wrong.

The Greens communications spokesperson, Sarah Hanson-Young, said it was “not good enough” that Optus management had failed to publicly explain the outage.

“It’s unacceptable for this prolonged outage to occur without basic accountability from this huge corporation,” she said.