This week, Telstra suffered a pretty serious outage, cutting mobile and data services on Tuesday. If you were affected, you’re probably angry, but on Sunday, you can take out your frustrations with free data.
Yep, that’s the deal: your service went down for a few hours, and you will now get a day of free data on 4G as a way of saying “sorry”.
“While the outage was short in duration we fully realise the impact it had on our customers, which is why we are offering all of our customers a day of free mobile data this Sunday,” said Kate McKenzie, Chief Operations Officer at Telstra on a blog about the mobile outage.
“Customers don’t need to do anything to receive the free data, it will happen automatically for all of our mobile customers.”
That means whether you have a prepaid or postpaid service, you’re getting free data on Sunday.
Not that we’d ever tell you what to download, but if you’ve been saving some downloads of movies you’ve bought on Apple TV or thinking of grabbing some software from Steam, it might be time to set up that mobile phone as a hotspot, plug it into the wall (to keep the charge up), and connect to the phone for 4G access.
As for what happened, Telstra is basically calling it a bit of human error in conjunction with the connection points that mobile devices to connect to, also called a node. When one of these went down from a technical fault, McKenzie said that “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”.
The good news is that Telstra worked to fix the fault as quickly as possible, but this data allowance on Sunday is to remedy any complaints customers might have had.
Seriously, it’s a day of unlimited data at 4G speeds. Go nuts, people.
