Telstra’s latest free data day backfires

Telstra’s latest day of unlimited free data did not exactly go to plan.

The telco let customers nationwide download as much as they wanted to on Sunday, to apologise for yet another network failure, but as people took full advantage, networks became clogged and network speeds had to be limited in some parts of the country.

Live streams of both major football codes were affected, angering sports fans.

But despite the issues, Telstra says the previous free day download of 1.8 terabytes, the equivalent of 2.3 million movies, had been smashed by the afternoon.

The day closed with a record 2,686 terabytes of data downloaded, 46 per cent higher than its previous record.

Also read: Telstra struggling, hit with third outage

The free data day was the second time Telstra has had to offer its internet services for free as another apology for the number of network outages which have plagued the telco company in the past few months.

The company suffered a major network outage on March 17 with around half of its 16 million mobile customers unable to make calls or go online, similar to a country-wide outage on February 9.

A third incident, which affected around 500,000 of its pre-paid customers losing service, occurred at the start of March.