Telstra customers hammer network on free data day

Telstra customers used up 2686 TB of data on Sunday during the telco's free data day mea culpa for its recent outages, outstripping previous records by 46 percent.

The telco was forced to offer the unlimited day of data following three significant outages over the past few months.

Yesterday's free data day was the second to be offered by the telco in two months, following a similar event in February that was prompted by an almost three-hour outage early that month.

In the February free data day, Telstra customers downloaded 1841 TB of data.

Yesterday the telco reached the peak network traffic level of the February free data day by 8am and passed the 1841 TB record by 4pm AEST.

Telstra networks boss Mike Wright said yesterday's consumption of 2686 TB of data was the most downloaded on its network in the telco's history.

"Customers took the opportunity to stream and download movies, binge watch TV shows, run computer updates and install software, and compete in gaming marathons around the world, for free," he wrote.

The telco was, however, forced to throttle some of its traffic in certain regions where "heavy users caused localised congestion", Wright admitted.

"[But] overall, the majority of customers continued to experience a reliable level of service, and we look forward to continuing to provide this well into the future," he wrote.

Subscribers to Telstra's AFL and NRL services took to social media to complain of streaming issues with live games due to congestion.

"Very poor connection and streaming speeds," one user on Twitter complained.

"Why should I be penalised for everyone using other things?"

Telstra admitted issues had affected AFL Live Pass subscribers, with users receiving an error code when trying to access the fourth quarter live stream.

In February, an "embarrasing human error" took out services for almost three hours after an underperforming node was taken down but restarted before customers had been transferred.

A month later, a connection problem in its international network downed mobile voice and data services for most of the night.

And in late March, Telstra customers were unable to make voice calls on the telco's fixed and mobile networks for around two hours due to a card failure in a media gateway in Victoria.

Read through for a detailed debrief of Telstra's recent network woes