Ericsson at fault for Telstra Wholesale outage

Ericsson has apologised for an 18 hour outage that affected Telstra’s wholesale operations, including ALDIMobile, Woolworths Mobile and Belong. 

The isolated incident started sometime on 18 June and was caused by a fault on Ericsson’s vendor platform. 

Speaking to CRN, a Telstra spokesperson said: “There was a vendor platform issue that impacted mobile virtual network operating services for a small number of wholesale customers.  The majority of those services have already been restored.  We apologise to these wholesale customers for any inconvenience.” 

In response to their part in the disruption, Ericsson in a statement gathered by news.com the company said:

“Ericsson today experienced an issue with the platform it provides to Telstra Wholesale to support its mobiles business.  During this time some Telstra Wholesale end users may not have been able to connect their services.  The issue has been resolved and we are working to investigate the cause of this incident.” 

Telstra also took to Twitter to clarify the extent of the outage and to reassure its customers of the isolated event. 

Similarly disgruntled users also took to the platform to express their frustration at the situation, as well as the complaints website AussieOutages which confirmed receiving complaints as early as 9.14am AEST, with Telstra’s outages page also reporting a number of issues in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Darwin and Hobart. 

The news comes a less than a month after Telstra’s five-hour nationwide mobile network outage that happened on 21 May. The incident was caused by a number of faults with some software that caused a domino effect on the network, with the company explaining that the fault “triggered multiple elements across the network to fail”.  As a result millions of its Austrailian customers were left without access to voice and internet services. 

Prior to that on 1 May, 3G and 4G mobile voice and data services for two hours nationwide.  But despite the slew of outages and disruption to services, Telstra networks group managing director Mike Wright, has said no compensation for customer effected.