Telstra Says Sorry For Outage With Another Day Of Free Data

At around 6pm last night, reports of outages on the Telstra network — again — started to emerge. The network began sporadically working again from 7:30pm onwards, and for the inconvenience Telstra are giving away a day of free data on Sunday 3 April.

Image: Telstra

“We sincerely apologise to our customers for the inconvenience we have caused again,” a Telstra spokesperson said this morning. “As a way of saying we’re sorry we’ll be providing a free data day for all of our mobile customers on Sunday 3 April.

“We had a problem that triggered a significant number of customers to be disconnected from the network. Reconnecting them to the network caused congestion. We had a connection problem overseas impacting international roaming customers which then had a flow-on effect domestically.

Despite this all being very familiar, Telstra insists this issue was a new one. Last time the problem was literally someone turning something they shouldn’t have off, and then on again. “The issue is not related to the outage that occurred in early February. The problem that repeated itself was in people reconnecting to the network.

“Following the last event we commenced a major process and engineering review of the network, which includes global network experts, to understand how it occurred, and while the two incidents are not related, we will add the lessons learned from this incident to that review.”

Last time this happened, and Telstra offered free data as compensation, 1,841 terabytes was downloaded — making it Telstra’s busiest day on the network, ever.


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