Telco giant Telstra has confirmed its premium SMS service is currently down and out, with no set time for a recovery announced.
However, according to a letter sent to one business through the telco giant, the service is expected to be up and running tomorrow – but messages sent during the downtime won’t be queued for delivery when the service comes back online.
In a statement, the company said it had experienced a “disruption” to its SMS service, but gave no further information as to what caused the problem in the first place.
“Telstra mobile customers who attempt to send a message to a Premium SMS short code will receive an error message stating: “The service you have requested is not currently available, please try again later. You have not been charged”.”
“Telstra customers will not receive any mobile-terminating Premium SMS services during the service disruption.”
SmartCompany contacted Telstra this morning to confirm whether the service was up and running again, but no reply was received before publication.
According to an internal email distributed by a premium SMS business, the service is expected to be up by tomorrow morning. But until then, premium partners will receive the same error message informing them the service is down and they have not been charged.
Apparently any messages sent by these providers using Telstra’s service will not be sent on automatically, so businesses will need to queue those messages themselves.
Patrick Stafford is a freelance journalist and a former deputy editor of SmartCompany.
