Mother’s Day with no phones? Is this 2023?

Jackie Davis says Telstra outages grossly affected her business on Mother’s Day. Photo TWH

Mother’s day plans were thrown into chaos at the weekend with a phone and internet outage leaving much of the Bourke Shire without telecommunications.

On what was the biggest day of the year for some businesses, operators couldn’t accept orders, access emails, or operate their billing service and customers couldn’t order Mother’s Day flowers or contact loved ones.

The unexpected mobile phone and landline outages have residents and business owners saying, ‘not good enough’.

Phone service was disrupted for hours on Saturday and Sunday, with Telstra describing the mobile outages on their website being the result of ‘planned maintenance’. The landline disruption was flagged as ‘unplanned’.

However, it seemed nobody in Bourke received prior notice of the maintenance, which is Telstra protocol, catching residents and businesses by surprise.

Internet, wireless EFTPOS, 3G/4G service and landlines were all impacted. On Monday morning, Telstra’s website stated the 3G/4G service may continue to have maintenance-related issues until this Friday, and issues with landlines may persist all week.

The outage was particularly painful because of the significance of Mother’s Day on Sunday, which meant families couldn’t make their special phone calls to honour Mum.

Jackie Davis from Nursery on Mertin was one of the businesses most severely impacted. She said the loss of service, without warning, had left her thousands of dollars out of pocket. […]

Read more in the printed edition of The Western Herald.

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