Telstra is calling its major enterprise and business customers on Friday to apologise for a disastrously-timed seven-hour network outage and discuss what compensation they might be entitled to.
Internet data services for banks, retailers, airlines, politicians, schools and hospitals were down across Victoria from early afternoon until about 9pm on Thursday.
Telstra shares were unaffected, hitting a four-week high of $5.58 during trading on Friday before closing at $5.57, 1c higher than the previous day.
A company spokesman said Thursday's fault was caused by "a device in the network behaving in a way that wasn't expected". This took out part of Telstra's data network in Victoria which affected about 20 per cent of business customers.
"We have spoken to all of our impacted customers to apologise, and we will continue to talk to them about the steps we are taking to improve our network resiliency. We will also discuss any claims for loss on a case-by-case basis with customers through our account teams," the spokesman said.
Department store Myer is mulling legal action after the outage left its stores unable to process card payments during the last day of the financial year. Customers needed to pay cash or get money from an ATM.
Myer calls its mid-year sale "Australia's biggest stocktake sale." While it's too early to estimate how much the outage cost Myer in lost sales, one analyst said it was unlikely to be significant.
This was the fifth major Telstra outage in the past six months, apart from usual weather-related network faults. The outages have hit mobile networks, fixed line ADSL customers and now enterprise-level data services. The timing has been so unfortunate – often coming just days after chief executive Andy Penn apologises or pledges to spend more on network maintenance – that conspiracy theories are popping up on discussion forums.
However, Telstra has ruled out the possibility it is being hacked, which suggests poor staff training, ageing equipment or insufficient maintenance were responsible.
"We have reviewed all the incidents and identified their causes. We have no evidence to suggest that the outages are a result of a third party action," a spokesman said.
The outage also wreaked havoc on election campaigns, hitting politician's offices two days out from the federal election.
Labor's Melbourne headquarters lost internet, forcing staff to use contingency measures and internet services at the electorate offices of all Victorian politicians and the Commonwealth offices at 4 Treasury Place were wiped out, although phones were working. Electorate offices have internet services provided by the Department of Finance.
Meanwhile Deutsche Bank recently surveyed 500 people about telco network quality and found "no significant change in the perception of Telstra's network quality following the network outages compared to six months ago". It also found 79 per cent of Telstra customers would not switch providers because of Telstra's network quality.
