Telstra’s network was unusable for ‘about half’ of its mobile customers on Thursday evening, with some users reporting the problem lasting for over 12 hours. The telco hopes to win back customers with a full day of free data on Sunday April 3.
On the Telstra Exchange blog, the telco’s CEO Andrew Penn explained that the reason for the outage was still being investigated, but that it appears that a large number of customers were booted of the network at the same time and then began trying to automatically reconnect. The flooded the network and caused a major congestion bottleneck.
Penn apologised to the Telstra customer base saying, “You expect seamless mobile service with Telstra and it is our responsibility to ensure that is delivered day in, day out.”
The free data day will kick in automatically for all Telstra mobile customers. There is no activation or registration process.
Painfully for Telstra, this is the second mass service outage for its mobile customers in two months, with customers struggling without Telstra service back in February. The last outage was blamed on human error, but this second outage has us wondering whether there is a more serious, ongoing problem that Telstra needs to deal with.
Free data records to set
Two major outages in as many months is disturbing news for Telstra and its mobile customers, but with the service back up and running, our attention turns to the free data day and the damage Telstra customers could inflict with unbridled access.
When Telstra offered free data on February 14, one customer managed to download 425GB of data in that 24 hour period. All up, Telstra customers used 1841GB on the day.
This new free data day offer will have many looking at the figure above and saying “Challenge accepted”.
Joseph Hanlon
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