A deeply embarrassed and penitent CEO Andrew Penn has apologised to the nation after Telstra late last week suffered its second recent widespread outage, affecting around 8 million mobile and data customers for up to four hours.
As with the previous outage in February, he has ordered that all customers be offered a day in which they can download unlimited data free of charge.
“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,” Penn said in a message posted on the Internet.
“Mobile phones and other mobile devices have become critical parts of our lives and our customers rightly have high expectations of us . 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, April 3. Customers do not need to do anything to receive the free data.”
