About half of our mobile customers experienced disruption to their voice and data services during yesterday evening.  On behalf of everyone at Telstra, I am very sorry and deeply disappointed this happened.

We are still investigating how the service disruption occurred, but our early findings show we had a problem that triggered a significant number of customers to be disconnected from the network, and as they were all automatically reconnecting at the same time, this caused congestion.

At Telstra we place the highest priority on getting things right for our customers. Our mobile network is a vital part of the nation’s infrastructure and it carries millions of calls and data connections for our customers every day.

Mobile phones and other mobile devices have become critical parts of our lives and our customers rightly have high expectations of us. We invest billions of dollars a year to meet and exceed these expectations and provide our customers with the best mobile experience in the country.

That is why it is so disappointing for us to have let down our customers.

We will be offering all of our mobile customers another free day of data as a way of making this right. This will be on Sunday 3 April 2016. Customers do not need to do anything to receive the free data.

While this is unrelated to a network outage last month, the congestion caused by people reconnecting to the network was similar.  Following the last event we started a major process and engineering review of the network, which includes global network experts, to understand how it occurred.  We will add the lessons learned from this incident to that review.

Once again I apologise for any inconvenience we have caused.  You expect seamless mobile service with Telstra and it is our responsibility to ensure that is delivered day in, day out.

Andy

For more information on free data day head to Crowd Support.