Telstra CEO Andy Penn has spoken to the media this morning to give an update on the national outage that affected Telstra’s mobile services yesterday afternoon and into the evening. He acknowledged that Telstra experienced an issue, that was not itself the cause of yesterday’s outage, but the reconnection of customers to the network following that issue caused mass disruption and congestion.
The underlying issue appears to have been with an offshore link interfering with roaming customers, and when that link was reconnected or reconfigured, a more significant issue was caused which affected much of Telstra’s network.
In recognising that 8 million customers were affected (up to 50% of Telstra’s network), Telstra will be providing another data free day, as it did following the last major outage just last month. This will be on Sunday April 3rd (in two weeks).
We’ll update this story once more details become available, both of the incident itself, and the steps Telstra took and will take to make sure it won’t happen again.
