Sydney-based firm Bannister Law has said lackluster compensation offered by Tyro has opened the way for a class action lawsuit, as businesses look to recover sales lost during the payment gateway’s outage in January 2021.

The outage seemed to happen due to a configuration issue, which ‘bricked’ a number of its eftpos terminals for ten days.

According to the law firm, Tyro offered a rebate on future merchant to businesses impacted by the outage which, in some cases, amount to about 10 per cent of sales lost during the period and locks them into ongoing contracts. Alternatively, businesses can go through a “long and protracted” dispute resolution process, which is controlled by Tyro itself.

“The compensation is inadequate,” said Bannister Law principal Charles Bannister.

“In our view Tyro has prioritised minimising churn of its customers over actually providing them with adequate compensation and if customers opted for the dispute resolution process instead of taking the rebate compensation, the onus appears on the customer to substantiate their losses.”

According to Bannister, Tyro’s failure was extensive and disasterous, and the businesses impacted deserve fair compensation – and it is actively investigating a potential class action lawsuit to get it.