Telstra's mobile network is suffering its second outage in two months.
Telstra has apologised for the mobile phone and date outage across its Australian network, blaming "a problem with a part of the network that allows phones to register", a process they say impacts the ability to make calls or use data.
Customers in Sydney, Melbourne and other capital cities and regional areas reported an inability to make calls or access the internet using their Telstra post-paid services from 6:30pm on Thursday.
TELSTRA | "We’ve received reports of an issue affecting mobile services and are currently investigating. We will provide an update asap"
— Ricardo Goncalves (@BUSINESSricardo) March 17, 2016
This is the second outage of Telstra post-paid mobile services in two months on top of on that affected pre-paid customers.
Comments on the Sydney Morning Herald's Facebook page indicate the outage is truly national, with customers from Longreach to Adelaide confirming they are without full service.
Around 8.30pm, almost three hours after the outage was first reported, the company confirmed they were working on fixing the problem.
"We're progressively restoring mobile services and anticipate returning to normal soon," Telstra said on Twitter.
However, the network was still down as of 11.30pm on Thursday.
The phone and internet giant blamed human error after an engineer caused a nation-wide outage affecting millions of customers for several hours in February by accidentally switching off a core node.
Earlier this month around 500,000 Telstra pre-paid mobile customers also suffered network problems.
Telstra has long relied on its perceived network superiority to justify premium prices. If the latest outage is of a similar scale then it could damage its reputation and help rivals Singtel-Optus and Vodafone Hutchison Australia gain ground.
A Telstra spokesman said the company was starting to fix the problem, which had spread across Australia.
"We believe the incident has impacted a proportion of traffic for voice and data across the country," he said. "The cause of the incident is yet to be determined but at this early stage we understand we have had a problem with the part of the network that allows phones to register and therefore make calls and use data.
"We apologise to our customers for the inconvenience caused."
Another day, another @Telstra mobile data outage.
— Denis Cheong (@DenisCheong) March 17, 2016
Third outage in two months. UNACCEPTABLE #telstra
— no (@coldwives) March 17, 2016
Customers can monitor the network on Telstra's service status page.
