In the past two months, customers of Australian mobile carrier Telstra have experienced network outages of varying degrees of severity prompting Telstra and primary equipment vendor Ericsson to launch a review process.
Last month, Telstra’s 16.7 million customers lost voice and data service nationwide. According to The Australian, Telstra blamed the network outage on an “embarrassing human error” that took a core node offline.
There was another nationwide outage on March 17, that Telstra attributed to a “signaling storm,” followed on March 21, by a “card failure in a media gateway,” The Australian reported, which cut service to 500,000 prepaid customers.
Following those service disruptions, Telstra COO Kate McKenzie is apparently overseeing a review of network infrastructure; Ericsson confirmed its participation on the “investigation team,” according to The Australian.
A Telstra spokesman confirmed McKenzie sent an email to staff regarding the review and told the media outlet: “We have nothing to add at this stage and we would prefer to call it a review,” not an investigation.
Telstra CEO Andy Penn, on March 28, told The Sydney Morning Herald: “On a personal level, I am deeply disappointed and I want to apologize to our customers. One outage is not good enough … two is absolutely unacceptable. All I can do is apologize, and I’m committing address this and to doing everything we can to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”