APCO manager Shirlene Ball said the outage came after a quiet winter and was taking a toll.

“We’ve had no EFTPOS and it’s taken seven days to get a mobile one from NAB,” she said.

“We’ve had a quiet winter and we just couldn’t afford to have this happen.”

Ms Ball said in the first days of the outage, staff would drive to Tower Hill to contact people in Geelong to make orders.

She said the manual swiping was too slow and too risky with scammers.

“The manual swiping is too slow to keep up,” she said.

“We’ve lost a lot of money.

“People have got Facebook and we still don’t have EFTPOS.

“After going through the first weekend of December, it’s starting to really hit.”

Ms Ball said that on Friday she was told by Telstra that EFTPOS would be working within 12 hours, but she was still waiting yesterday.

BP owner Darren Noseda said frustration was building because people weren’t getting answers. Mr Noseda owns the west Warrnambool BP in Raglan Parade and the Mortlake Road BP and said Telstra needed to be out in the community and to be honest.

“More than anything they need to be out there and be honest with where they’re at,” he said.

“Do we have to ring up and report a fault to the fault line?

“Do they think 95 per cent of landlines are connected when it’s only 20 per cent?”

Mr Noseda said he’d needed two staff at the counter each day to manually swipe credit cards and it was too early to know the total cost to his business.

“The frustrating point is it shouldn’t have happened, it should have been fire proofed,” he said.

“We’re 10 days down the track. So are we months away? Are we days away?

“95 per cent is crap. We need answers.” 

A forum for businesses will be held in Warrnambool at the Lighthouse Theatre on Thursday at 7.30pm.

The forum will be hosted by Warrnambool City Council and Telstra and will include Telstra representatives and local members of Parliament and government. For more information phone 5559 4800.