The Glen Innes business community is angry with Telstra after last Wednesday afternoon’s major telephone and internet outage caused major inconvenience to their customers.
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A Telstra spokesman said the outage was caused by a transmission issue impacting fixed line and ADSL services in the area.
"We apologise for the inconvenience this has caused,” he said.
However, an apology will not suffice for some businesses who will be seeking compensation from Telstra.
Bees Knees owner Mel Lindsay said now she has a telephone connection she will be seeking answers and compensation from Telstra.
“It was seriously inconvenient for myself and my customers, I had no internet and no eftpos machine,” she said.
“I was isolated and customers that wanted to pay for birthday or anniversary orders that needed to be picked up on the day had no way of paying for their purchase.
“The fact that it went on so long was very annoying, I can handle an hour or two but the fact I lost a whole afternoon makes me very angry and I will be talking with Telstra about some sort of compensation.”
Hair Dooz owner Sam Duddy said the outage made doing business very difficult.
“Obviously I couldn’t receive phone calls so anyone trying to make an appointment couldn’t, so it was really annoying and I definitely lost business,” she said.
“It was a big inconvenience for some of my customers who had to come back the next day and pay, and some have a fair way to travel into town to do that.”
Carelles owner Susan Waters said the outage caused her to lose custom on the day.
“The afternoons are usually very busy for me, but due to the outage it was very quiet, so we did lose business because of it,” she said.
“The customers we did have could not pay by eftpos and they could not draw money out of the bank to pay in cash, so it was a big problem.”
Caltex Glen Innes Manager Debbie Hutton said the outage cost the business money, but not from a lack of customers.
“We had to employ a security guard for the evening because our alarm system was compromised,” she said.
“Also our customers had to manually sign for card transactions, so we could still operate, but everything took a lot longer, customers were annoyed, that is for sure.”
