Telstra apologises after third major outage leaves customers furious
Telstra has apologised to customers after another major outage - the third in two months - left customers venting their anger on social media.
A spokesman for the company said Telstra would be "redoubling our efforts on resilience in the network and part of that is conducting a major review in relation to the outages from last week and February."
"The disruption today, which impacted less than 3 per cent of our mobile customers, was caused by a card failure in a media gateway in Victoria which meant certain calls could temporarily not get through," he said.
@telstra No you haven’t.
— Daniel Bevan (@DanielCBevan) March 22, 2016
"The media gateway allows the calls to connect.
"While small, we appreciate the impact this outage had on the customers affected, and we apologise to them."
In an earlier statement Telstra said the outage had lasted about an hour. Many social media users disagreed.
Reports of service outages came in from several major cities from about midday.
Telstra said the outage mainly affected Victoria and Tasmania with some intermittent outages experienced in other areas.
@Telstra Cant make voice calls on 3G/4G in Wynyard 7325. Please advise if there is a current interruption and ETA.
— Jason Arnold (@tassiedad) March 22, 2016
A Telstra spokesman said the company was investigating the issue following reports of customers unable to make voice calls.
"We've received reports from some customers facing difficulties making voice calls on our networks," they said.
"We're investigating as a priority."
"We are experiencing intermittent voice call failures and connection delays on our fixed and mobile networks – predominantly in Victoria and Tasmania, but impacting other states sporadically."
The telco's social media accounts were flooded with complaints by customers angry about the run of major service outages over the past month.
Social media users from several major cities reported difficulties in using their Telstra mobile and landline services.
The company was forced to offer users a day of free data after a nationwide outage in February. That outage was officially blamed on 'human error'.
@Telstra Very hard to pay my $140 bill when my phone doesn't work. Free data for one day doesn't pay anything back.
— Matt Vandenberg (@Vandenberg17) March 22, 2016
Another major network fail struck customers not long afterwards, prompting an embarrassing apology from the company's chief executive officer.
CEO Andy Penn said it was not good enough for eight million customers to be left without service.
"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."
Problems returned again to users in some areas over the weekend.
Customers were offered a day of free data services to make up for the second outage. A similar deal had been offered in the wake of the first failure.
Telstra users lapped up the offer of free data, pulling in 1821 terabytes worth of data the first time around.
That brought its own problems though with reports of data services slowing dramatically under the high traffic.
