A Telstra outage of 4G and 5G mobile services was confirmed at 3am on Saturday, May 10, with an initial estimated restored time of 10am the next day.
While mobile services were fixed on Sunday, May 11 at 11.12pm, customers expressed their frustration of the lack of service over the entire weekend.
For Sue Walley, owner of Fab Flowers Kyabram Florist & Nursery, Mother’s Day weekend is one of the busiest on her calendar, and losing mobile service meant they weren’t able to take flower orders over the phone or use their EFTPOS system.
Mrs Walley said they usually start at 3am on Saturday and work through until 1pm, but weren’t able to get out of the shop until 5pm on the Saturday because they had lost so much time having to work around a broken EFTPOS system.
“About 50 per cent of our business comes from Melbourne or overseas ringing to send flowers to mum, but they couldn’t even leave a message... it was such a busy time,” she said.
“There would have been about 20 people who called to place orders that couldn’t.
“There were just a lot of frustrating things, and not knowing when it would come back on was very frustrating.”
When Mrs Walley informed her customers over Facebook why they were unable to take calls, many jumped at the chance to support her.
“I was more worried that people would think we weren’t answering our phones, or that we had closed,” she said.
“People have been very understanding, but I wanted to make that clear with people that those were the circumstances, and we weren’t just ignoring you.”
Further down on Allan St at Ky Lucky Lotto, Miles Gould came in to work for what he thought would be a busy weekend with the $20 million Super Draw and a Mother’s Day weekend rush.
He soon found nothing working — phones, EFTPOS and TattsLotto machines — and was forced to close up shop before it had even opened.
“It disrupted our income, sure, but it also disrupted our customers’ days,” Mr Gould said.
“The biggest issue I had was that customers were put out and then the potential flow-on effect that has for the business.”
Mr Gould said they had to get a technician from Albury to come out on Monday to fix the machines, which he said had broken amid the outage.
He said he had reached out to Telstra for compensation by email, but had heard nothing back as of Tuesday, May 13.
Others on social media also expressed frustrations over the disruption the service had had personally.
Vicki Illmer said the communication from Telstra they received was “pathetic”, while Janice Johnstone said they hoped there would be reimbursement for customers.
Telstra’s regional general manager Steve Tinker said the disruption was caused by a “hardware issue” which affected mobile services in Kyabram, while NBN and broadband services were unaffected.
He advised customers to improve their mobile coverage by using their NBN connection to access Wi-Fi calling.
Mr Tinker said business owners could talk to their bank about connecting their EFTPOS terminals to their NBN or Wi-Fi connection to “prevent delays in processing transactions” in the future.
“We worked to bring everyone’s mobiles back online as quickly as possible, and we thank them for their patience,” Mr Tinker said.
A spokesperson for Telstra said compensation was discussed on a “case-by-case basis” and customers could call to discuss their individual situation.
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