Telstra’s 3G and 4G mobile services suffer national outage
The nation’s largest telco is suffering a serious hiccup in its mobile service provision.
Telstra prides itself on the quality of its network, so any kind of small scale outage is a relatively big problem. What then, if a national problem emerges?
That’s exactly the issue hitting Telstra, with an entirely unexplained outage affecting just about every mobile service Telstra offers right now. Telstra’s Service Status page lists a wide variety of services that are currently "unavailable" for unknown reasons. Specifically, it lists as a national fault that 3G and 4G mobile customers "may experience difficulties making or receiving voice calls or using data services."
Telstra's Twitter account has also acknowledged that there is an issue, but not what the fix might be:
We’re aware of an issue affecting mobile voice and data nationally. We’re working to resolve the issue ASAP. Thanks for your patience.
— Telstra News (@Telstra_news) February 9, 2016
Telstra’s network is usually held up as the gold standard in terms of 4G availability and speeds, with a recent analysis declaring the national telco as being the 12th best across the entire world. Right now, however, you may not think so if you’re a Telstra customer trying to place a call.
What can I do about the Telstra outage?
There’s no immediately evident fix to hand, because it’s not entirely clear what has actually caused the outage to speak of.
Update: Telstra's indicated that it has identified the issue:
We've identified the issue and services are being restored progressively. Thank you for your patience. Sorry for any inconvenience caused.
— Telstra (@Telstra) February 9, 2016
ITNews reports that the issue may relate to a network core switch being restarted.
It is worth noting that even if your service is offline, if you do need to make an emergency call, you should be able to dial 112 from your mobile to connect to emergency services, even if Telstra's network is down. This won't work for other call types, but exists across carriers to enable proper emergency calls to be routed through irrespective of network.
