Telstra subscribers in Australia suffered through a pair of service disruptions last week. The first one saw 1.5 million customers experience a major outage in voice calls and data, while the second one prevented broadband users from accessing a significant number of websites.
As an apology for the first service disruption, which was caused by a human error after one of Telstra's major mobile nodes went down; the company promised users that it will be giving away free data for Feb. 14.
It would seem that subscribers made the most out of the free data day, as according to Telstra, data traffic jumped as soon as midnight arrived, with the peak traffic levels on weekdays reached by as early as 8 a.m. Data traffic then continued to increase from that point.
By the close of the day, Telstra said that its subscribers have downloaded a whopping 1,841TB worth of data, which is equivalent to about 5.1 million episodes of Game of Thrones, 23 million copies of the new The Life of Pablo album by Kanye West, or 1.4 billion downloads of "Eye of the Sheep," the 2015 winner of the Miles Franklin literary award.
As data traffic over the free data day reached double what Telstra's networks sees daily, some customers experienced data speeds that are slower than what they are normally able to enjoy. However, the company said that its network was able to perform as designed, silencing critics that warned that the free data day could backfire as the surge in data traffic could lead to another network breakdown for Telstra.
"We hope it helps make up for some of the inconvenience we caused," said Telstra group managing director for networks Mike Wright in a statement, revealing the importance of the free data day to the company's attempt to apologize for last week's service outage.
Telstra's free data day covered all mobile data that was used on Feb. 14 by personal subscriber and business customers, along with customers that have signed up for the company's prepaid and mobile broadband plans. Subscribers that signed up with Telstra's retail partner, Boost, were also able to enjoy the company's apology.
