Telstra's outage has a 'secondary issue' now, and compensation talk has started

Telstra's bad week just got a second chapter.

A day after a nationwide outage took down mobile calls, data and access to Triple Zero for customers across the country, Telstra confirmed a secondary issue is still causing problems. Some Triple Zero calls returned an error message and tried to reroute to another network instead of connecting, which is about as serious as a telco fault gets.

Telstra says it reduced that error rate by roughly 90 percent overnight, but "mostly fixed" is not the sentence anyone wants to hear about emergency calls.

The company's software glitch explanation hasn't stopped the bigger question from landing: what do customers actually get for a day, and counting, without reliable coverage. Telstra CFO Michael Ackland told media compensation is on the table, saying the company will "work with all our customers once we've restored" service, which is corporate speak for yes, but we haven't worked out the details yet.

For context, after Telstra's four hour outage back in 2016 that hit eight million customers, the fix was a single free data day. Given this outage ran longer, touched Triple Zero access and has now stretched into a second day with a follow-up fault, a free data day feels like it might not cut it this time.

Telstra shares have also slid to a February low, so the market is clearly reading this as more than a one day story too. Investors tend to punish reliability problems far more harshly than a single bad headline, and a repeat fault a day later is exactly the kind of thing that turns a news cycle into a trend line.

The real test here isn't the outage itself. Networks fail, it happens. It's whether Telstra treats the fix and the compensation seriously enough that this doesn't become the story people bring up every single time the network hiccups for the next two years.

Right now, the jury, and the CFO's actual compensation plan, is still out.

Customers affected by either issue should keep an eye on Telstra's official channels for confirmation on what compensation actually looks like, rather than relying on rumours doing the rounds online.