We Can't Keep Up: Telstra Goes Down Again, Offers Another Free Data Day

They’re calling it Data-geddon III: With A Vengeance. (Okay, no one’s calling it that, but maybe we can get the word out?)

Telstra is once again offering members a full day of free data, following a four-hour blackout that saw as many as eight million customers affected, ABC News reports.

So, save up your downloads for Sunday April 3, and then go nuts. (You can find out more here.)

It comes on the heels of February’s free data day, which was instigated when some dude accidentally brought down 16 million services for several hours. (Telstra’s offering of free data for 24 hours resulted in their biggest ever download day, to the tune of 1841 terabytes, or approximately 920,500 episodes of Game of Thrones.)

This latest outage of the telco’s services began around 6:00pm AEST last night. Though most customers were reconnected within 90 minutes, others went without calls, texts and internet services for up to four hours.

Telstra CEO Andy Penn apologised for the blackout, though the blame this time did not get heaped on a random engineer. Rather, the culprit was simply congestion.

"I'm sincerely sorry to all of our customers. I know today how much you rely on the network and how much you rely on the reliability of the network," he said.

"So at a personal level, I am deeply disappointed and I want to apologise to all of our customers."

Earlier this month, some of Telstra’s pre-paid customers also faced an outage of their own.

There are also reports of further broken landlines and poor internet speeds today, with a Telstra spokesperson telling news.com.au that there is a routing issue between Telstra and Amazon Web Services.

Though the continued ‘free data days’ will no doubt be welcomed happily by customers, is the threat of continued outages enough to hurt Telstra’s reputation in the long run?

Or, are you just happy so long as you can get bonus data once a month? Let us know below.

Photo: Paramount.