Ready Your Routers: Telstra Is Giving Away More Free Data

On Friday, Telstra was hit with another massive network outage that affected hundreds of thousands of customers. It was the fourth service failure from the telco in as many months. As has become par for the course, Telstra will once again offer customers free data as an apology.

Last week’s network outage was one of the worst yet, with a leaked memo putting the number of affected customers at more than 350,000. At the time of writing, Telstra still hasn’t completely fixed the issue with some customers still experiencing “residual service difficulties” 48 hours later:

We're aware a small number of NBN & ADSL customers are still having residual service difficulties. For updates visit https://t.co/P9KGpiJt1e — Telstra (@Telstra) May 21, 2016

So what went wrong this time? According to Telstra, the cause of the outage is “extremely complex” and relates to a fault with the device that manages interactions between the network customers’ modems.

“We understand this has been frustrating for affected customers and we will be providing them with some additional data,” Telstra said in a statement.

In other words, more free data is coming — although it probably won’t involve a free mobile data day, like last time. Friday’s outage only caused disruptions on its NBN and ADSL networks, with mobile customers unaffected.

The telco has not provided details on how it will distribute free data. Presumably, broadband customers will have their data limits waived or extended during the next billing cycle. We’ll be updating the article when we hear more.

During its last two free data days, Telstra customers churned through a combined total of 4527 terabytes. Famously, a single customer managed to download nearly an entire terabyte of data in one day. (His haul included 14 seasons of MythBusters, 24 seasons of The Simpsons and the entire Wikipedia database.)

For those still affected by the current outage, Telstra advises you to keep your modem connected and powered-on and not reset it as this can cause further complications. You can find more connectivity tips here.