Telstra was yesterday hit by a major outage in its national mobile services, with millions of 3G and 4G customers across most of Australia unable to make or receive calls and data services unusable.
Some ADSL and cable broadband customers along with users on Telstra MVNO (mobile network resellers) partners were also reportedly affected. Worst affected areas were the capital cities of Sydney, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide.
The outage commenced around 12.45pm, and continued for most of the day, but services were restored to most areas by early evening.
The outage also had an impact on Optus and Vodafone customers, with many unable to connect to friends, family or work on Telstra’s network.
Telstra executives last night were blaming “an embarrassing human error” as the main culprit for the nationwide outage. Chief operating officer Kate McKenzie said that a failure to adhere to correct protocols had led to an “unforeseen impact” on the entire network
“The correct procedure was unfortunately not followed” when working on one of the network’s 10 mobile nodes,” McKenzie told Melbourne radio.
A Telstra statement published late in the day said the outage was caused when one of the nodes went down. “The network is configured to manage this; however in this instance we had issues transferring customers to other nodes, which caused congestion on the network for some customers,” Telstra said
