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Telstra is offering a day of free data following yesterday’s nationwide outage, however the fallout continues today as questions are being asked as to how it could have happened in the first place.Meanwhile, with businesses having potentially suffered lost productivity, the potential for a class action appears slim.
Following the outage, which saw customers around the country taking to social media to air their complaints, Telstra chief operations officer Kate McKenzie offered up an explanation yesterday evening, along with the day of free mobile data on Sunday.
As explained by McKenzie, the free data is an acknowledgement of the outage’s impact on customers, but it may well take more than this for Telstra to placate its customer base.
As for the outage, which McKenzie stated the telco was “incredibly disappointed” had occurred, its origins appear to lie in human error relating to repair of one of the nodes that make up Telstra’s mobile network.
“The outage was triggered when one of these nodes experienced a technical fault and was taken offline to fix,” McKenzie stated.
“This normally wouldn’t impact services as we have processes in place to make sure any customers currently connected to a node are transferred to another node before it is taken offline.
“Unfortunately on this occasion the right procedures were not followed and this resulted in customers being disconnected and consequent heavy congestion on other nodes as customers attempted to reconnect to the network.”
While business owners may have suffered lost productivity due to the outage, it appears there is little likelihood of any compensation.
According to Steven Lewis, ACA Lawyers principal, while Telstra has by its own admission been negligent, the potential for a class action lawsuit is unlikely.
Lewis told ChannelNews that ACA – which is currently running a class action against Telstra, Optus and Vodafone over the late fees charged to customers for not paying their bills on time – has “not been inundated by enquiries” with regard to the outage.
Lewis noted that the success of any potential class action would depend on a variety of factors beyond the occurrence of the outage itself, including its foreseeability.
For now, Telstra will be looking to get back to business as usual, while taking steps to ensure nothing of this magnitude happens again.
As for the free data, McKenzie stated customers will not need to do anything, with it to happen automatically for all Telstra’s mobile customers.
