At around 6.30pm, this journalist’s plane landed, and he couldn’t reach his wife to say he had arrived because Telstra data didn’t work. Turns out he wasn’t the only one.
Yesterday, Telstra went down again, and a good portion of its customers not only saw their data turn to nothing as traffic stopped working, but also saw voice connections fail, as well.
When I tried calling my wife, calls didn’t work and ended up going nowhere before the Galaxy S7 Edge I was using hung up, unable to connect properly to another phone. My wife’s iPhone 6 suffered the same, and while we both probably assumed it was the phones playing silly buggers, it was, in fact, a Telstra nationwide issue.
“We had a problem that triggered a significant number of customers to be disconnected from the network,” said a spokesperson for Telstra.
According to Telstra, reconnections to the network caused a lot of congestion, while a “connection problem overseas” had impacted international roaming customers and then basically had a knock-on effect.
“The issue is not related to the outage that occurred in early February,” said the Telstra spokesperson. “The problem that repeated itself was in people reconnecting to the network.”
While the explanation is probably not much of a consolation for the loss of being able to connect to friends and family, or even update the social network of your #telstrafail, it will result in another day of free data, just like last time this happened in February.
“We sincerely apologise to our customers for the inconvenience we have caused again,” said a Telstra spokesperson.
“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.”
Just like last time, if you have any pressing downloads you need to do, you’ll want to pencil them in for April 3. Granted, we expect the bandwidth to take a major hit as far as download speeds go past 9am, but if you’re keen for some mobile broadband activity for files of all sorts, April 3 is the day to try it.
