A Wagga businessman has advocated going back to “old money”, following a mass Telstra outage on Monday.
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The mobile service carrier reported thousands of customers across the country were unable to make or connect to the internet for several hours yesterday.
While complaints about network problems spanned across all major capital cities, Wagga businesses did not escape the country-wide outage.
With so many residents reliant on Telstra, O'Brien's Wagga Hot Bake Bakery owner Peter O’Brien said the impacts were going to be widespread.
Mr O’Brien’s words come after a 2014 report revealed Telstra had 16 million customers, which was more than its two biggest competitors combined.
Mr O’Brien said outages like Monday’s crippled small business trade.
The long-time baker lost the use of the store’s Eftpos machine between 10am and 1.30pm, which he said was his peak trading time.
He said customers who didn’t have cash on them had left his shop without their planned purchases.
Mr O’Brien said he felt it was ironic how technology was supposed to simplify business but in some ways, it was simpler before it existed.
“It would be better to go back to the way things were, with the old money,” Mr O’Brien said.
“Technology is supposed to make things easier, but when it goes down like this it’s shocking.”
Bigger companies, including Market Place’s Woolworths, reported their phones had been impacted, but thankfully trade remained unaffected.
This was not the case for smaller traders.
St Vincent de Paul volunteers reported the Peter street store was thrown into “chaos” on Monday morning, when its phones and internet stopped working.
Store volunteer Pat Ebert said it had made for a tough day.
“It’s been absolute chaos,” Ms Ebert said.
“We deserve better in this day and age.”
Telstra informed customers that voice and data services had returned to normal after 3pm.
In a statement, it apologised for the inconvenience and assured stakeholders it was investigating the root cause of the outage.
Networks managing director Mike Wright said a fault in the core of its network was to blame for Monday’s nation-wide outage.
The incident followed a similar occurrence earlier this month, with customers unable to make or receive calls for a number of hours.
A few days later, calls to triple-0 were impacted nation-wide in another outage.
Mr Wright said Monday’s issue was unrelated to earlier outages.
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