Category: Telecommunications

Telstra executive apologises for outage, says 'bug' to blame

Friday, 27 May 2016 15:26:18 | Lucy Carter

Telstra executives have finally spoken out about last week's mass ADSL and NBN internet outage that, at one stage, knocked 10 per cent of their customers offline.

Key points:

  • Latest Telstra outage caused by software update bug
  • Chief operations officer has apologised
  • About 10 per cent of internet customers affected
  • Expert says Telstra's brand has suffered

In a telephone conference call with journalists from across Australia, Telstra's chief operations officer Kate McKenzie publicly apologised.

"I guess I just wanted to start by saying we are incredibly apologetic to our customers for the inconvenience that's been caused to them by this recent service interruption," she said.

She acknowledged the outage had, at one stage, affected 10 per cent of their internet customers — roughly 370,000 people.

'There's been a lot of chit-chat about the cause of this outage," she said.

"I guess just to keep it at a fairly high level, a software update to one of our domain name servers caused that server to go down.

"It had a flow-on effect to our customers' modems and they couldn't undertake the regular check that they normally do in that environment."

She said while the software bug was fixed overnight, they did not anticipate a flow-on effect where a number of modems did not respond "as usual".

Telstra was widely criticised this week for twice publicly announcing online everything was fixed when it was not.

Ms McKenzie said the company now knew roughly 15,000 people were still unable to connect to the network this week.

Several thousand are still offline more than a week later.

"We have had to go through pretty much modem-by-modem, and domain-by-domain and down to customer-by-customer to figure out what the issues were and to get them back up and running," she said.

"We're very confident that we've got the vast majority of that resolved, although there are probably still a few residual issues for a very small number of customers and we are working through customer-by-customer."

Telstra is now sending a free modem to the thousands of customers who are still having problems from this latest outage.

Telstra going 'TITSUP' a blow for brand's image

Experts say the way the company has handled this latest major outage — the fourth of 2016 — has seriously damaged the brand.

Brand management consultant Alan Briggs said Telstra was too slow to respond to customers' complaints publicly.

"The public and business partners, they expect a rapid response in an instance like this. Prior to putting any messaging out to say things have been rectified you certainly need to make sure that is the case internally," he said.

The Government needs to step in at this point and demand that the investigations that Telstra has been doing into all of these problems be made public.

RMITT telecommunications expert Dr Mark Gregory

Telstra markets itself as a premium product and Mr Briggs said this reputation had taken a beating this year.

"This is the fourth, that we know of, outage so it certainly asks the question of the reliability of that product," he said.

"The public will start to question 'is this going to deliver what they promise' and will be starting to look around for alternatives given that it's been unreliable."

RMITT telecommunications expert Mark Gregory said the most recent response from Telstra may be too little, too late.

"People will lose confidence that Telstra really knows what's going on with their network, and there are a range of issues in regards to how Telstra is dealing with the problems," Dr Gregory said.

"So we should expect not only customers but business to become very concerned about the Telstra brand if this type of problem continues.

"These types of outages are known in the telecommunications industry as a 'total inability to support usual performance' — and have a snappy acronym to match.

Dr Gregory would like to see the Federal Government hold Telstra to account for these 'TITSUPs'.

'Telstra is the Universal Service Obligation (USO) provider, the Government needs to step in at this point and demand that the investigations that Telstra has been doing into all of these problems be made public and also be presented to the Parliament," he said.

"So that the Government can actually look and see whether Telstra is meeting its USO obligations, and what impact it's having on people who rely upon these services."



 

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