Another national Telstra Mobile outage – what’s going on?

Just over a month since Telstra suffered a three-hour plus national outage on its mobile network the company has today suffered another outage affecting vast numbers of customers across the country.

Telstra mobile users have been reporting outages on their services since late in the afternoon and at the time of writing (8pm) there has been no clear resolution or statement from Telstra about the cause of the outage.

The Social media team at Telstra have been responding to all messages with a simple response:

Just before 9pm Telstra announced services were being restored:

At 10.30pm Telstra provided the following statement: 

“We believe 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”

While customers across the country have experienced any number of concerns most notably data outages, as well as call and text failures.

EFTM understands the outage is affecting almost half of the Telstra network – possibly around 4,000 mobile sites.

As Telstra scrambles to determine the cause and implement a solution, serious questions must be asked about Australia’s largest network and most respected Telco from a network perspective.

In 2010 Vodafone suffered a degradation in it’s network over time which lead to a huge outrage and loss of customers in what was dubbed Vodafail – the difference then was it was not a single or even multiple instance of outages, instead it as a poor performing network which couldn’t keep up with the demands of it’s customers.

The result was a huge loss of customers, and under new CEO Bill Morrow a massive investment in their network to restore their credibility and service.

So what’s going on at Telstra?  #TelstraFail is trending on Twitter and another day of “free data” won’t cut it for their customers.

CEO Andy Penn needs to step in and demand some serious answers.  No point throwing an engineer under the bus this time.

• Why is their network no longer as resilient as their reputation has suggested?
• Why is there no redundancy in the network to work around such failures?
• Why on earth does it take so long to restore services in the network?

Something huge is wrong, and this isn’t about heads rolling, this is about understanding what is going wrong and instituting a huge cultural and engineering change to both restore the network’s reliability – and their credibility with customers.

The real problem for Telstra is that as the saying goes “trust takes years to build, seconds to break and forever to repair” – just ask Vodafone.