TELSTRA CEO Andy Penn has issued an apology today after the third massive network meltdown in weeks and offered yet another free-data Sunday to try and appease increasingly frustrated customers.
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Customers have taken to social media to vent their frustration about problems accessing the telco’s mobile network.
The nationwide outage in February was caused by a Telstra technician’s error.
“Two is absolutely not acceptable and all I can say is that I apologise and I am committed to address this and do absolutely everything that we can to make sure it doesn’t reoccur”, Penn told media this morning.
“We are working with [Telstra] to determine the scope of the problem and time to resolution”.
“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”, the statement said.
Telstra hasn’t confirmed what caused the issue in the first place, but said the load of millions of devices trying to automatically reconnect simultaneously caused significant congestion that only exacerbated the problem.
Perhaps we as your customers need to bill you for the inconvenience that you cause us when your service fails time and time again’. We had a connection problem overseas impacting worldwide roaming customers which then had a flow-on effect domestically.
At around 9.30pm on Thursday evening – hours after the outage was reported by customers – Telstra issued this update.
“It goes without question there will be another data free day”.
The latest network problem is an embarrassment for Telstra, which has the nation’s largest network by geographic coverage and fastest network.
Let’s see if angry Telstra customers can beat their previous record.
It’s bad timing for Australia’s biggest mobile communications company, coming just a month after another major outage on its network.
The blame for that incident was pinned on “embarrassing human error” when the correct procedure was not followed after one of the telco’s 10 mobile nodes was taken down.
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A Sydney Telstra user downloaded 412 gigabytes of data on the free data day in February. “Reconnecting them to the network caused congestion”, a Telstra spokesperson said.
