Optus’s triple-zero outage has opened the door for Australia’s biggest mobile services provider, Telstra, to charge even higher prices as customers flee its main rival, analysis of past crises shows.
The damaging September outage is Optus’s third major operational issue in recent years, creating a series of “churn events” that have prompted customers to consider changing telcos.
The company – which is facing calls for an inquiry after several deaths were recorded during the outage – also suffered a widespread network failure in 2023 and major data breach in 2022. The deaths of two people in South Australia and one in Western Australia have been linked to the September outages (a fourth death – an infant in SA – was found likely to have been unrelated).
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