Another day, another Telstra outage and another Telstra apology, as was the case over the past few days with the most recent ADSL and NBN outage.

Oddly, during the outage timeframe, Telstra's CTO Vish Nandlall has also departed last week, as I look at in my article entitled 'Mysterious CTO departure: So long and thanks for all the Vish,' although this departure has, apparently, nothing to do with Telstra's outage troubles. 

Despite suggestions modem firmware was to blame, as iTWire reported here (with earlier reports embedded in that article), Telstra says this wasn’t the case.

Kate McKenzie, Telstra COO, posted an article entitled ‘NBN and ADSL disruption: what happened.’

McKenzie then explained that “Every night when most of us are asleep, we make hundreds of changes to our mobile and fixed networks that are designed to both maintain and improve the network’s performance. Last Thursday night was no different. We made 800 changes on our fixed network alone, which is a pretty typical night of updates.

“Unfortunately one of those 800 changes – a software update to our Domain Name Servers – caused a number of servers to fail which resulted in a short outage of this function. Normally this would have limited impact however on this occasion it had a cascading effect on our broadband modems and gateways.

“This occurred when a regular ‘check in’ or ‘heartbeat’ signal used by our modems was not able to contact those servers. When the modems lost their ‘check in’ response it caused many of them to reset, reconnect to the network and attempt to update their settings. These events caused the initial disruption to service throughout Thursday night and into Friday when the network was stabilised.

“Unfortunately this process of resetting uncovered an unpredictable response from some of the modems and some of them continued to reset. This ongoing resetting continued for a small percentage of our customers across the weekend and into this week.

“Correcting this problem in resetting the modems requires a factory reset for some of them, or a replacement modem for others. Where a replacement modem is required, we are providing it free of charge.

“So the issue we’ve faced had nothing to do with a firmware or software upgrade to modems, as has been speculated.

“All of these consequences have been unexpected and we are looking into what we can do to prevent them from happening again. Some of the modems did not respond in the way they’re designed to do, and we expect we’ll be able to address that through a software update. We’ll also be addressing the network fault itself.”

McKenzie concluded by stating: “Importantly, we continue to have confidence in our fixed network. We have invested substantially over many years. We will continue to do so as we bring new features and services into the network and the home including Telstra Air, NBN Voice and HD voice calling, HD Video streaming, Telstra TV and more, making it one of the most advanced networks in the world.

“But we understand we have work to do to restore your confidence as well. I can assure you we will not stop until we do,” concluded McKenzie.

However, customers then starting receiving this message: “On behalf of Telstra, please accept my sincere apologies for the recent disruption to your Telstra voice and internet service.

“We know this issue has caused frustration given the important role the internet plays in your everyday life. We appreciate the trust that our customers place in us to deliver the very best network experience and we are extremely disappointed this disruption has occurred and affected your service.

“As a way of saying sorry for the inconvenience, and in line of your service being unavailable, we will automatically provide you with a $25 credit on your account. This credit will appear on an upcoming bill and you don’t need to do anything further.”

Naturally, this caused uproar with customers who suggested very firmly via Twitter that they had been inconvenienced to a far greater value than just a mere $25, and suggested such compensation was “rubbish!” or “an insult”, with some demanding $50.

Ultimately, problems occur, and it is very unfortunate for Telstra to have had so many issues affecting so many people so very publicly in the year 2016.

We can only take Telstra at their word that they are investigating everything as thoroughly as they can to prevent future and further outages, but with nothing being absolute perfection in life, or at least not, it seems, for very long before something pops up to shatter any perfection that may have been achieved – some kind of future outage is inevitable.

Let's just hope that when it happens, Telstra can fix things far faster than has currently been happening, and that customers end up the true winners in the competitive space.  

What impact this has on Telstra’s ability to charge a large premium for its services is yet to be seen, but the competitive mood in the telecommunications sector can only increase in such difficult times - with outages able to be experienced by any telco, not just Telstra, and competitive elements to challenge Telstra harder than ever. 

Here are some of the tweets that have appeared over the past few hours (before publication of this article.)

@Telstra $25 is an insult - the amount of time and frustration you have caused demands at least a refund of a months charges! #telstraoutage

— Tim M-Smith (@timboms) May 29, 2016

Anyone else get credited $25 from #Telstra for recent outages? That could add up.... pic.twitter.com/LLPSwyP0mW

— Matt Wordsworth (@MattWordsworth) May 28, 2016

@telstra #telstraoutage $25 for some customers. What a joke. Inconvenience, extra work to catch up. Shame on u. Will be leaving. Last straw.

— Red Shane (@RedShane1) May 29, 2016