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  • 2 years ago
The Optus crash left many businesses in the red, after their eftpos machines went down. Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry CEO Andrew McKellar says the outage was a hugely significant event for small business.

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00:00 Those small businesses lost pretty much a full day's trading yesterday.
00:07 For many of them, their payment systems were down, their order systems were down.
00:13 They were completely impacted.
00:15 So obviously that's a very, very significant impact.
00:18 I think it's been a fiasco from that point of view.
00:21 And clearly, this is a major issue that Optus has to respond appropriately to, particularly
00:28 for those smaller customers.
00:30 What we saw yesterday was a very poor communications effort by the company.
00:37 And I think their customers, whether they are private customers or small business customers,
00:41 will be looking for a much clearer indication as soon as possible.
00:45 So certainly some level of recompense or compensation is the fair thing.
00:51 It's the right thing to do.
00:53 And we would urge Optus to do the right thing to those customers.
00:58 We haven't had any clear indication from Optus about what they are proposing.
01:03 But certainly there is every argument there that there should be some level of financial
01:08 recompense to those customers.
01:10 The ball is in their court.
01:11 I think they have to really look hard at the way in which they're servicing their customers.
01:17 Otherwise, obviously the choice is there.
01:20 And people can vote with their feet.
01:22 So let's see what happens.
01:24 But certainly the impact yesterday was very significant for many, many business customers.
01:31 The federal government will conduct a review, which Optus has welcomed.
01:34 What does business want to see come out of that?
01:37 That's an appropriate step.
01:39 And here, there are many questions that are raised from yesterday's event.
01:43 It was a significant event.
01:45 It went on eight or 10 hours for some customers.
01:49 So very significant duration to have the network down.
01:54 And so many different levels of service not being able to be provided.
01:58 So we really have to look at that and understand how to manage that sort of risk in the system,
02:06 how to ensure that we've got the backup, that we've got the resilience, so that if we have
02:11 another major network outage across one or more communications providers, we're able
02:19 to find a way to respond.
02:21 Because so much of the economy now is dependent on these types of technologies.
02:26 [BLANK_AUDIO]
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