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Telstra proclaims free data day to make up for epic TITSUP

Sysadmin's nightmare: 'I crashed the whole network'

A somewhat red-faced Telstra is going to give its customers free data on Sunday to apologise for yesterday's mobile network outage.

It's also copped to the cause of the problem. A major switching node (one of ten in the network) failed, and some suffering sysadmin mistakenly sent traffic to the failed device instead of away from it.

The carrier describes the issue in this statement.

“The outage was triggered when one of these nodes experienced a technical fault and was taken offline to fix. This normally wouldn’t impact services as we have processes in place to make sure any customers currently connected to a node are transferred to another node before it is taken offline.

“Unfortunately on this occasion the right procedures were not followed and this resulted in customers being disconnected and consequent heavy congestion on other nodes as customers attempted to reconnect to the network.”

To get things running again, Telstra says it restored voice services first, then recovered data services.

Unusually, chief operating officer Kate McKenzie opened the kimono a little by telling The Sydney Morning Herald, the network can survive losing multiple nodes.

Telstra's statement promises that “Customers don't need to do anything to receive the free data, it will happen automatically for all of our mobile customers”.

McKenzie seems sympathetic to the staffer who made the configuration error, and in several radio spots yesterday afternoon said while there will be an investigation into what went wrong, the engineer has “probably had the worst day of his career”. ®

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