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Telstra customers complain over another service outage

TELCO restores mobile services as users complain of poor internet speeds, broken landlines and failure to access various websites.

Telstra customers have been hit with another outage.
Telstra customers have been hit with another outage.

TELSTRA has restored mobile services across the country after a massive outage that wreaked havoc on customers using their mobile phones and internet.

The outage, which affected about 8 million customers, continued for some users into the night.

There are also numerous complaints today of poor internet speeds, broken landlines and failure to access various websites with the finger being pointed at Telstra.

A spokesman for Telstra told news.com.au that it appeared there was a routing issue between Telstra and Amazon Web Services.

“Amazon changed the routing to a different path, which fixed the issue,” he said.

“We are working now to identify the cause.”

The glitch was the latest issue for the Telco, which was still reeling after last night’s outage.

Telstra chief executive officer Andrew Penn this morning issued a grovelling apology for the outage.

It was the second major outage for Telstra customers in the space of two months.

As customers remain furious after having no service for most of the night, Mr Penn said he took full responsibility for the outage.

The problem began after an issue that caused a large number of services to be disconnected at the same time, causing extreme congestion, he said.

Most services were restored within four hours.

“I’m sincerely sorry to all of our customers,” Mr Penn said.

“I know how much you rely on the network.

“One outage is not good enough. Two is absolutely not acceptable.”

The outage meant most customers were unable to use their phones, even for emergency services.

Mr Penn said customers would receive another data free day on April 3 and while he understood their disappointment he could only work to ensure this didn’t happen again.

Scores of customers took to social media to vent their frustration about problems accessing the telco’s mobile and data networks after the issue hit about 6pm last night.

Many experienced problems making and receiving calls and were unable to access their digital data service.

While a Telstra spokesman told news.com.au the service was fully restored overnight, some customers still reported problems this morning.

A spokesman for Telstra confirmed the issue occurred about 6pm with a “progressive restoration” beginning about 7.30pm.

However he said the issue was sporadic, which meant different people were affected at different times.

“We had a problem that triggered a significant number of customers to be disconnected from the network,” he told news.com.au.

“Reconnecting them to the network caused congestion. We had a connection problem overseas impacting international roaming customers, which then had a flow-on effect domestically.

“The issue is not related to the outage that occurred in early February. The problem that repeated itself was in people reconnecting to the network.”

In addition to the free data day, Telsta assured its customers lessons had been learned and a review would take place.

“Following the last event, we commenced a major process and engineering review of the network, which includes global network experts, to understand how it occurred, and while the two incidents are not related, we will add the lessons learned from this incident to that review,” the spokesman said.

Some users did try and see the lighter side of the situation, while others said a day of free data simply wasn’t good enough.

Telstra outages affected users all over Australia. Picture: AussieOutages.com
Telstra outages affected users all over Australia. Picture: AussieOutages.com

While Telstra says the problem has been fixed, many customers remained outraged after coverage dropped in and out throughout the evening as engineers worked to fix the problem.

“We are progressively restoring mobile services and we anticipate returning to normal soon,” the telco said about 9pm yesterday.

“The cause of the incident is yet to be determined but at this early stage we understand we have had a problem with the part of the network that allows phones to register and therefore make calls and use data.

“We apologise to our customers for the inconvenience caused.”

In February, the company blamed a worker for an “embarrassing” outage that saw customers all over Australia lose service for hours.

They offered free data for a full day to make amends for the “human error”.

However that didn’t stop customers venting their frustration about the outage on Twitter last night after the latest incident.

Original URL: https://www.news.com.au/technology/gadgets/mobile-phones/telstra-customers-complain-over-another-service-outage/news-story/8caff53905d8be1e7a52bb6f7ce713d5