Telstra Chief executive Andy Penn has publicly
apologised for the latest nationwide interruption to the company’s mobile
services that affected about eight million customers for up to four hours.

Reports of customer complaints in regards to having trouble
with the Telstra network emerged last night from about 6pm. Calls, texts and
internet services were affected.

Mr Penn fronted media at the company’s headquarters in
Melbourne this morning to express his regret.

“The cause of this [the outage] was an interruption and
a reconnection of those services to the network.

“I am sincerely sorry to all our customers. I know today
how much you rely on the network and how much you rely on the reliability of
the network.

“So at a personal level, I am deeply disappointed and I
want to apologise to all our customers.”

In mid-February, Telstra blamed a massive outage which
affected millions of customers on human error. As a result, the phone and internet
giant offered free data as compensation. A network record of 1,841 terabytes was
downloaded – the equivalent of 5.1 million Game
of Thrones episodes.

“Following the last even we commenced a major process
and engineering review of the netwoek, which includes global network experts,
to understand how it occurred, and while the two incidents are not related, we
will add the lessons learned from this incident to that review,” Mr Penn said.

“One outage is not good enough… and two is absolutely not acceptable and
all I can do is apologise and say I’m committed to address this and do
everything we can to ensure it doesn’t recur.

Telstra has vowed to provide a free-data day on Sunday,
April 3 as a gesture of apology.

– TiVi Tuan-san