Telstra Mobile Outage Update: Free Mobile Data Day On Sunday April 3

Users began reporting widespread issues with Telstra’s mobile network Thursday afternoon. Update: Telstra has provided further details on the problem, told Kotaku that it apologises for the inconvenience and will be “providing a free data day for all of our mobile customers on Sunday 3 April.

7:19am: Telstra notes that “the issue started at around 6pm and we started seeing progressive restoration from around 7.30pm. The issue was sporadic so different people were impacted at different times.

“We sincerely apologise to our customers for the inconvenience we have caused again. As a way of saying we’re sorry we’ll be providing a free data day for all of our mobile customers on Sunday 3 April.

“We had a problem that triggered a significant number of customers to be disconnected from the network. Reconnecting them to the network caused congestion. We had a connection problem overseas impacting international roaming customers which then had a flow-on effect domestically.

“The issue is not related to the outage that occurred in early February. The problem that repeated itself was in people reconnecting to the network.

“Following the last event we commenced a major process and engineering review of the network, which includes global network experts, to understand how it occurred, and while the two incidents are not related, we will add the lessons learned from this incident to that review.”

8:48pm: Telstra is “progressively restoring mobile services and anticipates returning to normal soon.” The telco now “believes the incident has impacted a proportion of traffic for voice and data across the country. The cause of the incident is yet to be determined but at this early stage we understand we have had a problem with the part of the network that allows phones to register and therefore make calls and use data. We apologise to our customers for the inconvenience caused.”

7:15pm: A Telstra spokesperson confirmed that it is “aware of an issue affecting some of our mobile customers who are having difficulty making and receiving calls, and using data.”

“We are looking into the cause of this issue and apologise for the inconvenience this is causing.”

Earlier: Reports of the outage on Telstra’s mobile service began flaring up late this afternoon, hitting its peak around 5pm. The rate at which users were affected is probably best illustrated with this handy graph, courtesy of the tracker Aussie Outages.

The outage has hit users across Australia, with those in capital cities and regional areas equally affected.



Telstra’s Twitter account is basically an entire wall of the same issue reposted time and time again, which has led to them also accidentally responding to users tagging Telstra just to pile in on the telco.


Even Telstra’s Service Status page was unhelpful, being unavailable at the time of writing. Telstra has also posted a blanket notice to all users as of a few minutes ago, hopefully to save them the hassle of people asking why they didn’t have reception.


We’ll keep you posted as the night goes on. We’ve also reached out to Telstra for comment, and when and if we hear back we’ll let you know what they say.






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