The outage left many businesses unable to process eftpos payments and consumers without cash were unable to pay for items.

Owners of Sublime in Narooma, Nicole and Dean Spencer, said their small business was affected by the outage for five and a half hours.

"It was both our phones and the internet that went down," Ms Spencer said.

"We do a lot of phone orders and nobody could contact us to place those orders, so I would have lost a lot of business yesterday."

The cafe's busiest time is usually during lunch.

"Normally at lunchtime my phone does not stop ringing," Ms Spencer said. "I can get between 20 and 30 calls during lunch for phone orders."

Ms Spencer said they were lucky the business was able to accept cash payments.

"Although we were seeing people pull up to our door in the morning, read the sign saying we were cash only and then they would just take off again," she said.

Luckily they were able to use the internet of a neighbouring business, The Holiday Lodge, to process card payments during lunch.

Owner of Elite Plumbing and Gas Solutions in Batemans Bay, Cassie Barton, said the outage was "inconvenient" for her business.

"The impact of the outage was very substantial," she said.

The business' phone lines were down for a number of hours.

"It created a lot of inconveniences for us," Ms Barton said. "We had a team out at Merimbula doing work and we couldn't contact them and they were ringing us from customers phones and payphones."

President of Business Milton Ulladulla Matt Dell said that there would have been "hundreds" of businesses affected by the outage.

He also said it's lucky that this didn't happen during the busiest time of year for businesses.

"While we haven't been approached by businesses, undoubtedly there would have been a number of businesses affected and it does make us concerned about what would happen if it was at a busy time of year," he said.

While a review has been launched into the Optus outage, businesses are being encouraged to apply for compensation.

The telecommunications watchdog is urging small businesses to get in contact with Optus to discuss options for compensation.

"What we would encourage you to do is contact Optus and ... help them understand what the impact was on them and their earnings," Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman Cynthia Gebert said.

"That's the sort of thing that we think you need to tell Optus so they get a sense of what sort of compensation might be the right thing to do for your circumstances."

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