Telstra will compensate users on a “case by case” basis for yesterday’s big outage

Australia’s largest telco has determined the cause of yesterday’s nationwide network outage which affected Telstra’s mobile service for a number of hours.

According to the company, a software fault brought down the 4G network, automatically diverting customers to the 3G network which then, in turn, overloaded. Telstra says that a failsafe built into the system, well, failed.

“We have identified that the initial cause of the disruption was a software fault which triggered multiple elements across the network to fail,” the telco said in a statement. “The network is designed to switch onto standby hardware, which it did. Following the failover however, a further fault caused an interruption which impacted 4G connections. There is redundancy built into these systems but this did not operate as intended.”

Customer dissatisfaction

Telstra’s technical woes seem to be a repeating theme in 2018; this is the third time this month that the telco has had to deal with an outage. On May 1, “technical changes” made to equipment prior an upgrade brought down the Telstra NBN and 4G networks, and three days later a lightning strike took out services in some regional areas, affecting even emergency calls.

Every time there’s been an interruption in service, Telstra has offered customers a free data day, but it is as yet unclear if the same will be offered in this instance. Mike Wright, Telstra’s managing director of networks, however, has said that the company “will treat this on a case by case basis. So if business customers have been impacted, then we ask them to contact us and we will discuss their situation one on one.”