Telstra customers must apply for compensation proving financial loss following outage

Telstra customers affected by last week’s outage will be able to apply for compensation from the telco after mobile voice calls and data services stopped working.

Millions of Australians had no mobile phone coverage and businesses were left without digital payments during last Wednesday’s nationwide outage.

Hundreds of people across the country were unable to connect to emergency services through Telstra, which saw the telco carry out more than 600 welfare checks.

Train services in NSW and Victoria were suspended during the outage, and EV charging network company Chargefox said on Wednesday morning a “small number” of public chargers were affected.

Taxi, Uber riders and Uber Eats were also affected.

Telstra chief financial officer Michael Ackland said business customers who suffered direct financial loss as a result of the outage could request a compensation assessment by complaining online to the telco.

Business customers will need to provide evidence of their losses.

“We need evidence to support your claim and will ask you to provide this by replying to this email,” Mr Ackland said.

“Providing a clear description of the impact, your estimated claim amount, and supporting documentation will help us evaluate your claim more efficiently.

“If necessary, we may contact you by phone to discuss further evidence or clarify your claim.”

Residential and consumer customers were also invited to file complaints if they were affected by the outage.

“We would like to apologize again for the disruption these issues have caused to our customers and the wider community,” Mr Ackland said.

“We know how much you rely on our network for business, travel and staying safe, and we take that responsibility very seriously.”

A Telstra executive said they detected an issue with a network device that keeps time synchronized between parts of their mobile network early last Wednesday.

He said voice and data services were intermittently disrupted when network synchronization was lost, and the issue was mostly resolved by the afternoon.

“Some business customers took a little longer to fully restore their services and we worked closely with them until they were back online,” he said.

“Once we resolved the initial outage, we identified a subsequent issue affecting some calls, including Triple 0.

“In these cases some people calling Triple 0 received an error message and their phone then tried to connect to an alternative mobile network.

“By 12.30pm on 9 July we had implemented a solution that fixed the issue affecting some calls to Triple 0.”