Optus cuts 200 jobs, Aussie telco giant’s O-Team impacted

Optus will cut almost 200 jobs in a new round of mass redundancies, just months after hundreds of jobs were cut.

According to the Communication Workers Union, the telecom giant will lay off 198 employees this week.

They include significant cuts to the company’s O-Team, which was created just three years ago to help customers install smart devices.

It is understood many employees received layoff notices on Tuesday. The Australian reported.

All affected employees who are out of work will be notified by Wednesday at 5 p.m.

Australia’s second-largest telecoms provider began discontinuing the O-Team service last month following a recent review of the business.

The team installed smart devices including security cameras, doorbells, smart TVs and EV chargers.

Optus has issued a notice via the company’s website informing customers that O-Team’s wired installation service for smart devices has been discontinued.

Customers were told that anyone who recently purchased a wired O-Team device that needed to be installed would still be able to have it installed before January 30.

The CWU has condemned the latest job cuts at the telco, after 600 jobs were cut last year.

“It is deeply concerning that Optus is adding a further 198 redundancies to the growing list of workers left without jobs in a cost-of-living crisis,” National Assistant Secretary James Perkins told the publication.

“We have seen the impact of these types of cuts in the recent Optus outage, and we will continue to see service declines as they continue to cut where they should be investing: in the Australian workforce and the local network.”

An Optus spokesperson told Daily Mail Australia the company is “continually evaluating” its organizational structure to meet customer needs.

“We recently conducted a review and are taking steps to simplify our business, while still investing in the areas we know are important to our customers,” the spokesperson said.

“As part of this review, we are realigning a number of teams across our business.”

The job losses mainly come from a department that the telecom giant founded in 2021 to help customers install smart devices

Optus laid off 600 staff last year in a series of mass redundancies, including 150 from its Adelaide headquarters last November.

Earlier that month, 10 million Optus customers were thrown into disarray when the telecom provider’s network went down and internet and phone services were cut.

CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin, 46, then created a PR disaster of her own when she went missing for seven hours as essential services and businesses struggled to cope.

The company said a “routine software upgrade” caused the outage before the connection was restored about 12 hours later.

Ms Bayer Rosmarin resigned within a week of the national outage.

The latest cuts at Optus (pictured) follow a recent overhaul of some of its services