Border business identities on both sides of the Murray have described the Optus meltdown as "catastrophic for the region".
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One likened the economic blow of Wednesday's 12-hour outage to a major natural disaster, another said he would expect many enterprises to shift providers.
"Many will say two strikes and you're out," said Tim Farrah, the Albury-based regional manager of the Australian Industry Group.
"First the cyber attack last year, and then this - they're not going to wait for a third time."
Business Wodonga chief executive officer Graham Jenkin said he expected some businesses to consider launching a class action to try to recoup their losses.
He said while some operations were unaffected by the outage, many connected to Optus were devastated.
![Business Wodonga chief executive officer Graham Jenkin. Picture by Mark Jesser Business Wodonga chief executive officer Graham Jenkin. Picture by Mark Jesser](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/170490233/dcad0e9d-a854-4852-9dd1-9eed5aa6de01.jpg/r0_0_5360_3395_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
"No one's contacted me regarding a class action but I think we just wait to see," Mr Jenkin said. "Losses would have been in the hundreds of thousands of dollars at a minimum.
"Firstly, we need to know what caused the outage and Optus should release that information as quickly as possible.
"The internet is critical infrastructure for Australia, when you have over 10 million Australians impacted by this and over 400,000 businesses.
"This is a disaster the equivalent of a major bushfire or a flood, it's just so challenging to do anything these days without that connectivity."
Mr Jenkin said the outage would have "driven home to many businesses" how vulnerable they were in the event of technology failing.
"We'd hope that Optus will do the right thing, particularly to businesses, because it's the businesses that employ people, it's the businesses that have got their owners' homes mortgaged.
"They more than anyone deserve some compensation for any losses they suffered yesterday.
"With so many EFTPOS machines down yesterday, the outage was probably a lesson to many of us as to how cash can still be king."
![Australian Industry Group regional manager Tim Farrah. Picture by James Wiltshire Australian Industry Group regional manager Tim Farrah. Picture by James Wiltshire](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/170490233/02172659-227c-4e55-bea0-7ec7a2d115e4.jpg/r0_0_5472_3417_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
Mr Farrah said while outages of the scale on Wednesday were rare, it brought to light "how much people are at the mercy of a single provider".
"As far as EFTPOS goes, people just don't carry cash around these days," he said. "It's a wake-up call as to how reliant we are on these providers.
"So many things in life depend on being connected to the internet.
"I don't know how many business over here (Albury) were connected to Optus so you couldn't even ballpark a figure as to the total loss - those figures might come out over the coming weeks."
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