Sydney

Telstra apologizes for lengthy network outage in NSW outback over Mother’s Day weekend

Telstra has apologized to residents in a remote town in northern New South Wales after a massive outage of mobile and landline phones unexpectedly disrupted basic communications for the entire weekend.

The telecom company had planned a planned outage to upgrade its 5G mobile site in Bourke, 370 kilometers northwest of Dubbo, but an automated text message it had planned to notify residents a week earlier was not sent. said.

Telstra said work on the upgrade will continue until Friday.

“Unfortunately, our investigation revealed that the week before the upgrade our text messaging system was going down. Manager Michael Malom said.

In another incident, landline service in the city of Burke, home to more than 2,600 people, was also affected by a hardware failure over the weekend, but has now been restored.

“I would like to offer my sincere apologies to residents and businesses in the Burke area affected by the intermittent power outages that began Saturday afternoon following the renovation work,” Malom said.

Dubbo resident Leanne Harvey said she was “heartbroken” when she failed to call her elderly parents on Mother’s Day Sunday.

“My father is not well and we have no family to support him,” Harvey said.

“So I can only hope that everything is fine and that I didn’t have to call the ambulance a few times recently.

“That’s totally unacceptable. I don’t know how they think this is acceptable in this day and age.”

Telstra says the upgrade will continue until May 19th and will require an extended shutdown.()

Malom said residents will be able to call emergency services as long as there is service from other network providers.

“Triple-0 is a network diagnostic, so you can make calls as long as mobile service is available,” he said.

People at Bourke will continue to experience intermittent disruptions to mobile service in the region until Telstra completes its upgrade work, which is scheduled to end on May 19th.

“Our crew is working hard and barring unforeseen problems due to weather or other delays, we should be able to complete the work by that date,” Malom said.

He said Telstra was reviewing systems related to SMS notification failures, but said Bark would be able to offer a “massively improved” service once the upgrade was complete.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-05-15/telstra-apologises-for-outage-after-sms-warning-failure/102345610 Telstra apologizes for lengthy network outage in NSW outback over Mother’s Day weekend

Related Articles

Back to top button