Does Telstra Know How To Fix Its Social Media Slow-Down Issue?

If you’re a Telstra (or Telstra MVNO) customer, you know one thing for sure this week: social media is sloooooooooow. The good news? Telstra knows it too. The bad news? From what we can tell, it doesn’t know how to fix it, or at least when we can expect results.

We first noticed the problem on Sunday, and since then, it’s been getting traction elsewhere in the media as Instagram photos fail to load in social feeds all over the country and Facebook updates time-out left right and centre.

Here’s Telstra’s official comment:

We’re aware of an issue causing some customers to encounter delays in loading some web content. Our technicians are currently working, with a third-party, to resolve the issue and we’ll advise once services normalise.



The delay with loading some internet sites is experienced when customers are seeking some content which is hosted off-shore. Customers will not be experiencing the same delays when seeking content that is hosted on-shore.

It’s great we can get local content quickly, but that doesn’t help when Twitter, YouTube, Google, Instagram, Facebook, eBay, Yahoo and just about every other service you could care about is located overseas.

Sources are telling us that it’s a caching issue when it comes to loading web-accelerated content from Akamai and Squid-Cache, but Telstra won’t confirm or deny it when we put it to them.

All we know for sure right now is that it sucks and we’re waiting on a fix. Until then, hit up your local Wi-Fi for reliable social media updates.