Months after a widespread outage towards the end of last year that led to a serious dent to telco Optus’ reputation in Australia, reports have indicated that it incurred a $480 million annual net loss.

The loss for the 12 months to March 31 was more than six times the previous year’s $79 million loss.

It included a $582 million writedown blamed on “churn and price erosion” in Optus’ enterprise business, reported the Australian Financial Review. However, Optus has signed a six-year contract with Services Australia, a government agency which manages Centrelink, in June for customer services, including contact centres and fixed voice calls.

Optus’ operating revenues were flat at $7.9 billion.

Its parent Singtel previously revealed a $S3.1 billion ($3.5 billion) writedown in late April, mostly related to its Australian subsidiary.

Optus has set aside $132 million of provisions in its 2024 accounts. It partially indicates how much money the company expects to spend in the future on costs associated with its national phone and internet outage in November and a 2022 cyberattack.

The network outage cost the telecoms group around $60 million. Estimates vary, but the outage is believed to have directly affected more than 10 million people and 400,000 businesses across the country. Optus chief executive Kelly Bayer-Rosmarin stepped down from her role a few weeks after the incident.

Optus has had to contend with other matters where it is being taken to the courts in Australia. The Australian Communications and Media Authority filed a lawsuit in the Federal Court against it in May alleging that it did not protect the confidentiality of “personally identifiable information” of its customers from unauthorised interference or access during the 2022 cyberattack.

While Optus reportedly hired Deloitte to undertake an independent external review of the cyberattack and its security systems, controls and processes, Optus is now fighting a court battle to stop that report from being released as part of class action proceedings brought by Slater & Gordon on behalf of the telco group’s customers.

Optus has also made a $1.5 billion payment to ACMA in late June to pay for the cost of buying mobile spectrum. The payment was funded by its immediate parent, Singapore Telecom Australia Investments. Optus will also receive a further $500 million from the parent entity to use as general working capital.

Recently, following an extensive investigation by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), Optus as well as Telstra agreed that they will no longer have exclusive agreements with Google Search to have the service pre-installed as the default search engine on Android devices that they sell. Those agreements reportedly limited the ability for rival search engines to be pre-installed and promoted on Android devices, in return for a share of Google’s advertising revenue.

Optus has also cut hundreds of jobs over the last few months. In February, it announced a decision to cut 198 jobs as the result of “realigning some teams across our business.” That figure was on top of the 90 redundancies it announced earlier that month, and 600 jobs cut last year before it was hit by the outage.