Earlier today we experienced an outage on our mobile network that impacted voice and data services for some of our customers. I wanted to let you know what occurred, what we did to fix it and what we’re doing for our customers as a result.
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. That is why we’re incredibly disappointed the outage occurred and deeply sorry for the inconvenience we caused.
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. 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. 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.
As soon as we identified what had occurred we worked to address the fault and take action to bring customers back online as quickly possible. In doing so we prioritised voice services, and when these were back online we started adding data services. While the outage was short in duration we fully realise the impact it had on our customers, which is why we are offering all of our customers a day of free mobile data this Sunday. Customers don’t need to do anything to receive the free data, it will happen automatically for all of our mobile customers.
I apologise again on behalf of the company and thank everyone for their patience while we restored services.