Telstra blames ‘software fault’ for five hour outage

TELSTRA’S explanation for their latest outage that shut down large parts of its network and affected callers’ ability to contact triple-0 is unlikely to appease its angry customers.

TELSTRA has revealed multiple faults led to its five-hour nationwide mobile phone outage yesterday, with a software problem causing something of a domino effect inside it network.

Millions of Australians were left without access to voice and internet services on their mobile phones after 10am, and services weren’t fully restored until just after 3pm.

Despite restoring services, Telstra was unable to name the specific cause of the fault yesterday, and today revealed it would conduct further investigations to find out what triggered the software issue.

In a statement, the company revealed the software problem “triggered multiple elements across the network to fail” and even backup systems designed to rescue the situation did not work.

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Telstra’s outage caused issues across Australia. Picture: Supplied

“Following the failover, however, a further fault caused an interruption which impacted 4G connections,” the company revealed.

“There is redundancy built into these systems but this did not operate as intended.”

Instead, the faulty hardware re-routed mobile phone connections to Telstra’s 3G network, which became overwhelmed, and disconnected many users.

Telstra said it had “isolated the impacted network infrastructure” by 11.40pm, but it took a further two hours after that to restore services, and even longer for “some government and enterprise customers” to reconnect.

That statement came after consumer advocates called on Telstra to provide refunds to millions of mobile customers as a “goodwill gesture” after the company suffered its third nationwide outage in a month

But Telstra repeatedly ruled out mass compensation for its customers, saying it would only be willing to “work with them on a case-by-case basis”.

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The outage prompted NSW Police to issue warnings that anyone in an emergency should seek out a landline phone as the network problems could affect “people trying to call triple-0”.

Emergency calls were instead forced to divert to working mobile phone networks for a connection.

The outage came less than three weeks after a widespread technical issue brought down landline connections in five states, affecting some triple-0 calls for 10 hours.

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The issue also affected Telstra’s Service Status page. Picture: Supplied

Another Telstra mobile network outage on May 1 also disconnected mobile phones from the 4G network nationwide until it was fixed two hours later.

Despite the string of outages, Telstra networks group managing director Mike Wright rejected calls for all customers to be compensated, and said even a day of unlimited mobile data downloads would not be considered as customers “with such generous allowances” did not need it.

“Look, with times like this, we will talk to individual customers and work with them on a case-by-case basis,” Mr Wright said.

But Australian Communications Consumer Action Network chief executive Teresa Corbin called on Telstra to provide refunds to affected customers, as all three outages this month had caused significant inconvenience and potentially harmed trade for small businesses.

“It would be a good thing for Telstra to make a goodwill gesture to their customers at the moment because they are worrying whether Telstra is the best network for them, especially if they’ve chosen Telstra for its reliability,” Ms Corbin said.

Consumer groups have called for Telstra to provide compensation after yet another network outage. Picture: Getty

“Some sort of monetary refund is always better than just saying ‘free data’. Plus, if Telstra is having trouble handling congestion on its network, perhaps free data isn’t the best thing to do; perhaps the best thing is an apology and a monetary amount.”

Ms Corbin said small businesses should approach Telstra with cases for compensation regardless of future offers, and take their claims to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman if they felt they were not heard.

The latest outage also came at an inopportune time for Telstra, which posted poor financial results and warned investors its earnings were shrinking in a more competitive market, despite attracting 60,000 more postpaid mobile customers over three months.

Telstra also faces legal action from rival Optus, which has taken the company to court over its advertisements for an “unlimited” mobile phone plan.