Telstra makes up for massive outage with a day of free data

Telstra has announced it will compensate its customers with a free day of data this weekend after customers around the country lost service during a massive network outage.

All Telstra mobile customers will be able to use mobile data for free this Sunday, with downloads not to be counted against their monthly mobile data allowances.

In a post on the Telstra Exchange blog, Chief Operations Officer Kate Mackenzie explained that the outage had been traced back to human error in dealing with a much smaller problem in the network. 

“The outage was triggered when one of these nodes experienced a technical fault and was taken offline to fix. This normally wouldn’t impact services as we have processes in place to make sure any customers currently connected to a node are transferred to another node before it is taken offline. Unfortunately on this occasion the right procedures were not followed and this resulted in customers being disconnected and consequent heavy congestion on other nodes as customers attempted to reconnect to the network.” MacKenzie wrote in the post.

While a problem with a single node may not sound like an issue that could affect a large portion of the network, reports of access issues spread across Australia’s capital cities.

Website Aussie Outages, which tracks network issues, shared a map showing concentration of outage reports in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth.

TK Kurikawa / Shutterstock.com

Joseph Hanlon

Editorial Director | X | LinkedIn

Joe Hanlon has been immersed in mobile phones, plans and the internet for over a decade, having written for publications like CNET, Techradar, Gizmodo and Lifehacker. He steers the editorial ship and makes sure that we are always serving up the most useful guides and recommendations. If you ever bump into Joe on the street, don't be afraid to ask for a phone recommendation. It's embarrassing how much he enjoys talking about this stuff. He also loves listening to podcasts, so feel free to email Joe with recommendations.

Read full bio