Telstra is giving free data on Sunday as a way to appease its mobile customers who have been affected by a mass outage of its mobile network service.
The company said that the major nationwide outage that affected the customers' data and voice calls is due to an "embarrassing human error." Kate McKenzie, Telstra's chief operations officer, acknowledged the error and added that the company has never intended to cause any level of inconvenience to its customers.
"First let me say we place the highest priority on the quality of our networks and we're continually investing to ensure we give our customers the best and most reliable mobile network in the country," said McKenzie.
A spokesperson at Telstra said that the human error had occurred after one of the company's major mobile nodes went down. The said node is one of the nodes that is responsible for managing voice and data traffic between devices.
"Our mobile network is set up with a number of major connection points (what we call nodes) around the country, which our customers connect to," said the spokesperson. "These nodes are the equipment that essentially manage the flow of voice and data traffic across our mobile network. The outage was triggered when one of these nodes experienced a technical fault and was taken offline to fix."
While the company added that they have certain processes in place to address the issue, which prevent users from getting affected, these procedures were not followed correctly. Initially, the customers complained that they were disconnected although they eventually tried to reconnect. However, other unaffected nodes suffered from heavy congestion, which in turn affected users in their attempt to reconnect.
According to Telstra, the first thing that the company had prioritized in dealing with the issue was restoring its voice services. After bringing these back online, the company followed it up with the restoration of data services. Telstra expressed how it managed the situation in a tweet.
We've identified the issue and services are being restored progressively. Thank you for your patience. Sorry for any inconvenience caused.
— Telstra (@Telstra) February 9, 2016
Though the outage had occurred briefly, Telstra acknowledged that it had a huge impact on its customers and announced that it is giving a day of free mobile data to all its customers on Sunday. The company added that the free data will kick in automatically and advised its mobile customers that they don't need to do anything to receive the free data.
