Telstra CEO forced to personally apologise after major network outage leaves customers furious
Telstra CEO Andy Penn has been forced to make an embarrassed apology after a major network outage left an estimated eight million customers furious last night.
At least half of the Telstra network went down just after 6pm AEDST last night, affecting emergency phone networks, train services and some calls to Triple Zero as well as normal phone and internet usage for customers in Sydney, Adelaide and Brisbane.
Mr Penn said the outage meant 50 per cent of calls were prevented from going through because of the outage.
"One outage is not good enough ... two is absolutely unacceptable," Mr Penn said.
"All I can do is apologise, and I'm committing address this and to doing everything we can to make sure it doesn't happen again".
"On a personal level, I am deeply disappointed and I want to apologise to our customers."
Telstra has announced customers will have a free day of data on Sunday April 3rd.
Angry users took to social media to complain about the outages.
“Got a person in my house with health issues and no reliable phone. This is so bad. Your service is terrible," one user wrote.
@Telstra pls fix your network pls and thankyou goodbye
— holli (@buterawoke) March 17, 2016
@Telstra everyone is having the same problem! I hate TELSTRA!
— Munaj (@Munaj16) March 17, 2016
The outage impacted train services, emergency phone networks were disrupted and some calls to Triple Zero weren't connecting
More than three hours after the outage there was no explanation from Telstra, just a message:
The network issued a statement saying it is "progressively restoring services" and anticipates "returning to normal soon".
whats up @telstra is your network down?
— Shaun (@Sbarry86) March 17, 2016
@isobelroe I'm delivering cake now - can't call because Telstra is down!!!
— Vivien von Drehnen (@vivienVD) March 17, 2016
It's the second major network fail for Telstra since February, which was blamed on human error and dealt with by refunding unhappy customers with a day of free data.
Telstra apologised to customers for any inconvenience.
"We believe the incident has impacted a proportion of traffic for voice and data across the country," a statement read.
"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."
