Telstra under growing pressure over outage compensation

Telstra is confronting mounting pressure to provide compensation to customers affected by a recent nationwide network outage. The disruption caused significant financial losses for some, including Uber driver Turab Ali, who estimates he lost up to $400 in expected earnings. Ali, who recently transitioned to full-time driving after graduating from university, described the loss as substantial given current living costs.

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$400 a week goes a long way. It's tough. Everything's expensive at the moment.

The outage impacted Ali's mobile services, both with Telstra and its subsidiary Belong, causing him to be offline during what is typically a busy period. He has since switched his secondary service to Optus and intends to seek compensation from Telstra, questioning why the telecommunications giant would have issues repaying its customers.

Under Australia's Consumer Law, services under $100,000 are generally covered by consumer guarantees, requiring services to be provided with due care and skill. University of Melbourne law professor Jeannie Paterson explained that Telstra's liability for compensation hinges on whether the company was negligent in taking reasonable steps against a foreseeable risk. If negligence is established, customers may be able to recover the cost of the service during the outage period, along with other reasonably foreseeable losses, such as lost business income.

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Telstra is one of the largest companies in Australia. I don't see why they would be any problem in repaying their customers at the end of the day.

The outage was attributed to a software bug that caused the network's internal clocks to go out of sync. Previous reports indicated that Telstra had been warned about its vulnerability to such timekeeping issues by academics and government agencies. Investigations are underway to examine the software fault and identify measures to enhance the reliability and resilience of the company's timing systems. Affected customers can submit claims through Telstra's online forms, with businesses needing to provide evidence of direct financial losses.

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If Telstra was negligent, Telstra is liable for compensation. There's no doubt about that. What is uncertain is, one, whether the telco was indeed negligent and, two, the extent of that compensation.