Compensation has been suggested in the wake of a major Optus failure.  

Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin has responded to the national outage of phone and internet services affecting 10 million customers, resulting in significant disruptions. 

The outage was so extensive that it temporarily shut down Melbourne's train services and prevented people from making vital emergency calls. 

While Optus managed to restore all services by late afternoon, the CEO refrained from providing a detailed explanation, citing the complexity of the technical issue.

“It's a very technical explanation for what happened,” Bayer Rosmarin told reporters.

“There is no soundbite that is going to do it justice, so we want to really bottom out the root cause and when we have that very clear and in a digestible form, we will be forthcoming." She said she had “no idea” about the timeline required for a thorough analysis of the outage, suggesting that such incidents are not unusual when operating infrastructure on the scale of Optus.

The outage has raised the potential for a flood of compensation claims from businesses and consumers who were adversely affected. 

The government has launched a public review into the incident, in addition to an investigation announced by the Australian Communications and Media Authority. Communications Minister Michelle Rowland stressed the importance of transparency and timely updates for frustrated customers during such service disruptions.

Assistant Treasurer and Finance Minister Stephen Jones called for compensation for those affected by the outage, particularly small businesses that suffered financial losses. 

This incident has also shed light on the need for telecommunications providers to have effective disaster recovery planning and network redundancy to prevent single points of failure.

While the root cause remains undetermined, it is clear that the outage had a substantial impact on a wide range of services, including major banks, public transport operators, and small businesses. 

The telecommunications industry ombudsman has advised Optus customers who were dissatisfied with the company's response to make a formal complaint.