Optus compensated users $1.2m for "lost income" from 2023 outage

Optus customers managed to extract $1.2 million in cash and service credits from the telco to compensate for lost income from its 12-hour outage on November 8 last year.

The figures [pdf] were published as part of a senate inquiry into the outage, albeit a month after the committee already handed down its report.

Compensation for the unplanned outage was a major customer complaint, mostly offered in the form of extra data quota.

In the inquiry report, ex-Optus chief Kelly Bayer Rosmarin said most customers would be entitled only to “between $1 and $2” in financial compensation otherwise.

She then told the inquiry in mid-November last year that 8500 customers had made claims for $430,000, of which Optus had paid out $36,000.

The new set of figures shows that a subset of these claimants - 1154 - ultimately succeeded in being compensated by the telco specifically for “lost income”.

They collectively received $481,038 in cash and $761,843 in service credits, for a total of $1.24 million.

Most of the successful claimants - 90 percent - were consumer users. The compensation averaged $474 per user in cash and service credits, although cash was proportionately a small component.

Some 15 enterprise customers also managed to secure almost $282,000 in service credits.

Most of the cash compensation went to 75 consumer or small-to-medium business (SMB) customers.

A separate response from the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO) - which fielded customer complaints related to the outage - indicates it had a hand in helping customers access about $53,000 “in total credits offers, compensation paid, or debts adjusted”.

However, the TIO said [pdf] it “did not learn the outcome” for the majority of the complaints it triaged.