This morning, Telstra chief operations officer Kate McKenzie announced the company is investing $50 million to prevent outages across its telecommunications services after several embarrassing incidents in the past few weeks where its mobile network went down. A few hours later, it’s fixed-line broadband service experienced an outage. Oh, the irony. Here’s what we know.
Aussieoutages.com has reported that hundreds of Telstra customers on the telco’s BigPond broadband service had trouble connecting to the internet at around 11.30am this morning. The website collects status reports from a number of sources, including customer comments on social media, to determine outages and service interruptions.
According to Telstra, the outage mainly affected ADSL in Queensland and it only lasted around 30 minutes. This is still not a good look for Telstra which has taken a beating in recent weeks with a string of mobile network outages and the controversy around its stance on same-sex marriage.
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2 responses to “There Was Another Telstra Network Outage Today (And It Came At The Worst Time Possible)”
I’ve seen them pin the blame on “human error” a number of times. I can only assume the $50m is going in to building human-proof systems, as opposed to training and staffing.
Small parts of Telstra’s network go down on a regular basis – sometimes because of events like flooding, sometimes because some chap with a backhoe didn’t Dial-Before-You-Dig and managed to unearth a whole bunch of fibres.
It’s the same for every carrier. 100 DSL customers without a service isn’t even a Severity 2 outage and certainly not newsworthy – it’s been happening almost every week since Malcolm Turnbull invented the internet.
So true. I used to work on their help desk taking calls from customers, wholesale partners, and field technicians. It’s crazy the amount of times someone called to report them or someone else just dug through a core cable just because they failed to Dial-Before-You-Dig or simply just be careful. There were so many occurrences of this which are just unavoidable. This obviously isn’t the cause of every outage, but faults of this nature are so frequent I’m surprised there’s not an outrage story every two days.