Telstra suffers another outage, offers a free day of data

Telstra is offering another free day of service after the second outage in 2 months hit the network yesterday.

This outage left approximately half their mobile users with no service, including emergency calls. Most of the network was restored within four hours, but some users reported that they had no service this morning.

Congestion from a large number of services being disconnected at once and simultaneously reconnecting was reportedly the crux of the problem.

“While this is unrelated to a network outage last month, the congestion caused by people reconnecting to the network was similar,” said Telstra CEO Andrew Penn. “Following the last event we started a major process and engineering review of the network, which includes global network experts, to understand how it occurred. We will add the lessons learned from this incident to that review.”

To make amends, Penn reported that users would get another free day of data, set for the 3rd of April.

Following the last day of free data, Telstra’s network saw twice as much traffic as usual, amounting to 1841 TB of data being downloaded over the course of 24 hours.

No action is required from customers to claim the free data.