The fallout from the catastrophic Optus power outage has worsened for Kelly Bayer Rosmarin after comments she made about a hairdresser affected by the outage seriously backfired.
More than 400,000 businesses were affected for up to 12 hours by Wednesday’s nationwide outage, which cut internet and phone services to customers of the country’s second-largest telecom company.
North Sydney Barbers manager Jake Azar was forced to turn away customers and close his business by lunchtime, a heartbreaking decision that cost him hundreds of dollars.
To make matters worse, crafty customers took advantage of the EFTPOS blackout by saying they went to the ATM to get cash to pay but never returned.
During a media appearance, Ms Bayer Rosmarin was stunned to learn that the mass outage was impacting a barbershop’s ability to provide haircuts.
The North Sydney Barbers manager (pictured) has hit back at comments about his company by Optus boss Kelly Bayer Rosmarin
“I’m disappointed that a hairdresser couldn’t cut it today,” she told Nine News on Wednesday.
“That seems like one of the few things you can do without connectivity.”
The comments about his company angered Mr Azar, who felt he was being thrown under the bus by the Optus boss.
He has since issued a scathing response.
“If she does her job, I can do my job. But I can’t do my job if she’s not able to do her job,” Mr. Azar said news com.au.
‘I had to laugh a bit at what she said, but she needs to take more responsibility.
‘If I have a bad haircut, I have to acknowledge it and fix it. If I can do that, she can do that in turn, instead of waiting on customers.”
Mr Azar now plans to switch phone providers and sign up with Telstra in the wake of the latest debacle, just a year after Optus customers were hit by the data breach scandal.
Kelly Bayer Rosmarin was surprised when she heard that a hairdresser could not go to the hairdresser on Wednesday
North Sydney Barbers manager Jake Azar (pictured) was forced to turn away customers and close his business around lunchtime on Wednesday due to the Optus outage
Anne Nalder, chief executive of the Small Business Association of Australia, branded Ms Bayer Rosmarin’s comments as inappropriate.
“How can you say this is all you get when you’ve lost employee wages and there’s no productivity anymore? It shows you how out of touch she is with the real world. “Any CEO who says that should be fired,” she said.
It comes as Optus has announced it will not offer financial compensation to customers. Instead, they will receive an additional 200 gigabytes of data, which can only be used on weekends and must be activated by the end of the year.
“The bottom line is that we wish we could have done something different today and we know there is nothing we can do to make it right,” Ms. Bayer Rosmarin said.
“So we hope that our customers appreciate that we really tried to do something valuable for them.”
The cause of the malfunction was a technical defect.
The fallout from the massive outage continues at Optus 48 hours later
About 400,000 businesses were affected by the Optus outage, including this Adelaide coffee shop, which could only do cash transactions