Telstra mobile network suffers outage due to fire
Telstra's network is hot, but not in a good way.
If you’re a Telstra customer currently experiencing difficulty with your mobile service, and especially if you’re based in Sydney, then there’s a reason for that. Telstra’s Twitter account says that services may be disrupted right now due to a fire at its exchange in Chatswood.
A fire at one of our exchanges is impacting some mobile and fixed services. We're working to resolve ASAP. Thanks for your patience.
— Telstra (@Telstra) February 2, 2017
Telstra has updated its service status page with the following statement:
A fire at the Chatswood Exchange in Sydney this afternoon has been contained, but damage has been caused to some power infrastructure. As a result a number of customers’ are experiencing loss of service. Our technicians are currently completing a full assessment of the impact. We will provide more information as soon as it is available.
Anecdotally, we’ve noticed difficulty sending and receiving text messages in Sydney at the time of writing, but it’s too early to say how much effect this particular outage will have on the carrier’s nationwide network. We've seen reports from social media that suggest Telstra's exchange outage may be hitting its network nationwide, and will update with any further details from Telstra.
Update: Telstra indicates that it's started rolling services back out again:
Services are beginning to restore. Thanks for your patience.
— Telstra (@Telstra) February 2, 2017
Update: Telstra says that the outage may have affected the delivery of SMS messages:
Due to today's incident, it's possible some SMS messages were incorrectly delivered. All messages will be held while we resolve the issue.
— Telstra (@Telstra) February 2, 2017
As a reminder, if you're a Telstra customer in a genuine emergency situation, dialling 112 should connect you to emergency services even if its network is down.
Telstra suffered a number of outages in 2016 due to network errors, which it apologised for by way of free data Sundays. As a reminder, your rights during an outage can vary depending on the language in your contract, with Telstra having the option of a one-off $40 payment in its standard terms of agreement. Whether you would qualify for that would depend on the final extent of the outage once services are restored.
The outage comes in the same week that Telstra launched its Gigabit LTE network and the accompanying Telstra Nighthawk M1 router.
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