SMEs were among those left without internet access yesterday, when telecommunications giant Telstra encountered yet another network outage.
June 30 is one of the busiest days for businesses as the financial year ends but many businesses, both large and small, were affected by the outage across Victoria and New South Wales.
The outage is believed to have been caused by issues at one of the company’s major exchanges in Melbourne, according to The Australian.
Banks, including National Australia Bank and ME Bank, were hit by the outage, as were retailers, including Officeworks, Myer and the Good Guys, according to The New Daily.
The outage occurred less than 24 hours after Telstra had announced a $250 million plan to improve the core network of the system.
Scores of Telstra business customers took to Twitter and Facebook to complain about the outages, with many mentioning they were unable to complete their tax forms for the end of financial year.
“Telstra network down on the last day of the financial year, not cool at all man,” said one customer.
“Telstra please don’t announce any more $250m network upgrades. Yesterday was very frustrating trying to close out financial year online,” said another.
@Telstra down 3 hrs across Melb. Our whole operation come to a grinding stop! And it’s end of month and financial year! #telstraoutage
— Fulvio Antonelli (@fulv1977) June 30, 2016
This is not the first Telstra outage to cause disruption to businesses in recent months, with outages occurring in both May and March this year.
David Markus, founder and managing Director at IT services firm Combo, told SmartCompany these outages can have a direct affect on businesses.
“When a business is disconnected at an ISP level, it can cause a lot of grief for them,” Markus said.
“It can have a direct impact on their ability to transact and do business.”
Markus advises businesses worried about outages to work on failsafes within their networking.
“For many of our clients, we set up a redundant connection as a failsafe method,” he said.
“If a business is connected to Telstra ADSL or fibre, they can put in a 4G connection option as a backup.”
Although Telstra continues to suffer outages, Markus is confident that the telco will get back on its feet.
“If anyone can build a robust network in Australia it is Telstra,” Markus said.
“They may have encountered some problems recently due to recent regulatory changes, but they’re working on filling in all the gaps.”
In a statement provided to SmartCompany, Telstra apologised to “all affected customers and their customers for the impact that this has caused”.
“We had a fault that overloaded traffic in part of our enterprise IP network in Victoria. The disruption affected some of our enterprise and business customers,” the company said.
“The network issue was restored at around 8.30pm, after which we worked with customers to confirm their services were up and running.”
Dominic Powell is a journalist at SmartCompany and a tech and music geek. When he’s not writing, you can find him reading or browsing record shops.
