Telstra, the largest mobile operator in Australia, announced voice and data services on its 4G network were getting back to normal levels after being hit by its second network outage this month.

In a tweet, the operator said it resolved the nationwide outage after bypassing hardware which prevented some customers from accessing its 4G services. The problem also affected its 3G network because traffic was offloaded to that infrastructure.

“We’re very sorry for the interruption to services,” the operator stated in the tweet.

The operator, with a 51 per cent market share, confirmed in the morning it was facing a network outage, which started about 10 am local time on Monday (21 May).

Nationwide impact
While Telstra did not say how many customers were affected, network monitoring company Aussie Outages said the problem affected major Australian cities including Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide (see image below, click to enlarge).
Before service was back to normal, Telstra had said its 3G and 4G voice and data traffic volume was being progressively restored as it worked with many of its enterprise and government customers to ensure a swift resolution.

Thousands of Telstra subscribers have taken to social media to complain about today’s outage, which comes a matter of weeks after a similar problem with the operator’s 4G network.

In that case, the outage was caused by technical works during an upgrade to traffic control equipment in Melbourne.