Second Telstra outage hits customers in as many months. What is going on?

For the second time in as many months, Telstra customers have been affected by a nationwide outage that has left customers frustrated and looking for answers.

How could this happen to the nation’s biggest telco again?

On February 9, Telstra’s network vanished for hours, leaving customers high and dry and without a connection to the cellular network or the internet.

On that occasion Telstra’s woes were the result of an error with correct recovery procedures not being followed.

This time around, it appears the effect was felt across the nationwide with angry customer taking to Twitter to vent their frustration.

Customers in Melbourne, Sydney, Queensland, Adelaide, Western Australia were not able to connect to the Telstra.

We’re progressively restoring mobile services and anticipate returning to normal soon. We’re sorry for the inconvenience caused.

— Telstra (@Telstra) March 17, 2016

Other facilities like ATMs and EFTPOS terminals were also offline as a result of the outage. As late as 9pm (March 17), Telstra’s services were slowly coming back online.

Telstra released a statement that read:

“We are progressively restoring mobile services and we anticipate returning to normal soon.

“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.”

After the February incident, Telstra offers a free data day as a way to say sorry for customers. But what’s going to happen this time? Will Telstra come clean about exactly what happened?

@Telstra it’s becoming a weekly thing for me now – once I felt empowered by the good signal reception, now I’m so disappointed.

— Steven Bai (@bai_bye) March 17, 2016

UPDATE: MARCH 18, 2016

Here is Telstra’s latest response to the outage:

Note 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.”

Can we expect another free data day? Yes we can. The last one was naturally very popular with Telstra customers back on February 14.

This time the free data day will occur on Sunday April 3.

Telstra, the nation’s biggest and best network has left its customers down for the second time this year.

We want to know the same things its customers want to know.

What the hell’s going on?