Telstra outage estimated to cost hundreds of millions of dollars | The Business | ABC NEWS

Wednesday's nationwide Telstra outage hit small and medium businesses hard.
The economic cost of the latest Telstra network outage could run into hundreds of millions of dollars, RMIT associate professor Mark Gregory says.
Dr Gregory, who is with RMIT's School of Engineering, has done previous reports on the estimated economic cost of telecommunications outages, including at Optus in 2023.
He says it can be difficult to quantify the cost of outages but says a conservative estimate would be an average cost of $4,000 to $5,000 an hour for small to medium businesses.
He says these figures do not account for extra economic costs to larger businesses and government organisations.
"The lost productivity due to telecommunication outages means that there's an ongoing cost, not just to small businesses but to medium and large businesses, government organisations," Dr Gregory said.

Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman Cynthia Gebert is urging consumers and businesses to first complain to Telstra, but says if they fail, to contact her office.
Telstra chief financial officer Michael Ackland said the telco would work through compensation requests as part of its business as usual process.
Andrew McKellar from the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry said Australia needs surety of reliability of the system.
"If that's breaking down on a repeated basis, then we've really got to look at how we can address that and provide that greater surety to the community," he said.
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