Telstra customers blazed through 1,841TB of mobile data on Sunday

Telstra mobile customers blazed through 1,841TB of data on Sunday, the telco's apologetic "free data day".

In order to say sorry for an unprecedented outage last week, Telstra gave all of its mobile subscribers 24 hours of unmetered data usage. Group Managing Director for Networks Mike Wright said traffic jumped as soon as the clock hit midnight, and had reached peak weekend traffic levels by 8am.

"Over the course of the day we had twice as much traffic as we would normally see on a Sunday (or any day)," wrote Wright on Telstra's official blog. "As we anticipated, the high demand meant some customers had slower than normal data speeds on 4G services, but overall the network performed as designed."

Wright said customers' data usage was equivalent to downloading 5.1 million episodes of Game of Thrones, or Kanye's new album 23 million times.

With the right smartphone or modem, a Telstra customer could have theoretically downloaded as much as 4.7TB over the 24-hour period, provided they were consistently able to achieve the 450Mbps speeds the network is capable of.