Telstra apologises to prepaid customers with 200MB bonus data
Prepaid customers hit by Telstra’s 2-3 March 2016 outage will get 200MB of free data by way of apology.
Telstra’s network has long sold itself on its robustness, but recent times have been trying for the telco’s reputation. First there was the outage on 9 February 2016 relating to human error that saw the telco offer free data for a day on 14 February.
More recently, intermittent outages on 17 March saw services interrupted for an afternoon and early evening period with Telstra again rolling out a free data day, set to run on 3 April 2016.
Between those dates, however, Telstra suffered another outage, affecting only prepaid customers. On 2-3 March 2016, prepaid customers were unable to access recharge tools, and call charging was interrupted as a result, with some customers unable to top up balances and potentially losing credit accruing on their accounts as a result.
There were some issues with calls, most notably international calls at the same time. Telstra says it has contacted any customer who has lost recharge value as a result of the issue providing them the opportunity to roll over any lost value.
It has also sent out an SMS to affected customers offering an additional 200MB bonus data to be applied to their account. The SMS reads:
"We’re sorry about your recent Pre-Paid experience. From 10am 2 March to 10pm 3 March all calls, data and SMS’ were free but there were two short periods when some of your offer inclusions were consumed. To reimburse you for this, we’ve applied 200mb of data to your account within the last few hours."
If you've received the SMS, you should see the data top-up applied, and presumably if you haven't you were not amongst the affected customer group.
Telstra has also written up a FAQ to cover other eventualities, such as customers applying recharges they didn’t need due to service interruptions, or overseas customers unable to access their credit, but in every case it boils down to contacting Telstra with your particular circumstances to see what can be arranged.
