• expired

Telstra Prepaid Disruption - FREE Domestic Calls, TXT and Data until 10PM AEDT 3/3

900

UPDATE AS OF 12:40am MARCH 3, 2016
We are aware of an issue that may be preventing some pre-paid customers from seeing their usage and recharging their account, including via the Telstra 24x7 app and MyAccount. Customers are also currently unable to make calls to overseas numbers. We are working to fix this as quickly as possible and we thank you for your patience.

Although you may not be able to view your available credit, you will still be able to make and receive domestic calls, send SMS messages and access the internet, no matter what your credit balance is. You will not be charged for calls, SMS and internet until the recharge tools become available again.

If you needed to recharge during this period to rollover your credit, data, call or other inclusions, we will honour these balances.

EDIT:

As of 6.39PM 3/3. There have been no updates on the Telstra Crowdsupport page. So far it seems any old Telstra prepaid sim will do, even a new one activated today (without credit) by KaptnKaos. But for people with actual credit, probably keep an eye on the balance regularly and make sure they don't start charging for the usage. Also keep an eye on the Crowdsupport page, as its probably where they will make the announcement on when the system is fixed.

EDIT 2:
Just received txt, finishes at 10 PM AEDT

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closed Comments

  • Does this mean free 4G internet on prepaid SIMs again?

      • +6

        Internet works on a $2 boost prepaid sim that is not yet activated.

      • +2

        lucky I kept a pre-paid telstra SIM that was used over xmas when in a remote area.
        calls expired in Jan, but internet is working on it now :)

      • thats not to stop any of us with prepaid telstra SIMs to go crazy with 4G internet again.

      • It's a workaround for a Telstra issue, data won't be tracked until they fix it.

      • +1

        It's a flaw in a system, not a reward.

        Hi Spackbace. I'm with Boost and my month expired midnight Tuesday. Tried recharging yesterday morning with no luck. #111# doesn't work and the online portal is giving errors. I jumped on a chat session at 8am yesterday, and was number 121 in the queue! After waiting 2 hours, I got through to them. They basically made my phone work again without me handing over a cent. They said once the system was operational again, my phone would stop working and I'd need to recharge. So I guess in effect I'm getting free calls/text/data until whatever needs to be fixed is fixed.

        • My wife is with Boost and today is the last day of the recharge. Will see if the service is still working tomorrow if Telstra haven't fixed up the error by then.

    • +3

      Working perfectly on a brand new unregistered 2$ sim for me. Unlimited downloads! (And at faster than Liberal NBN speeds…)

  • +2

    Bit of a joke really, been down since lunch yesterday. Giving us a few hours of free data/phone calls 24hours later geez

    • +3

      actually it was down since before 7am yesterday, thats when i contacted them - que was 80 people and i was waiting 4 hours, by the time i got answered they had put a notice on the sign in page that they are aware of problems affecting customers and were working on it.

      • +4

        Wow - impressed you had the patience to wait 4 hrs :)

        • +12

          i didn't wait, i had it run in the background did some other things, even went out and gardened. it pings when they answer and my dog goes nuts when he hears the ping so he came running out to me.

        • @kima:
          I need to know more about this "ping" thing?

        • +1

          @kiwipride: just put your volume on and it makes a noise like ping, or ding like a bell?, if que is long - open 2 chats in different browsers because sometimes it will disconnect you

  • how long would it go on for ?

    • Until it is fixed, which could mean now, tomorrow, yesterday, you would never know. Until it says you have used up your credit.
      Tread with caution

  • +1

    Yeah net working here by inserting one of my prepaid sims with zero credit into 4GX modem, nice while it lasts, lol

  • I can see my prepaid account balance and can recharge but still cannot make international calls.

  • +10

    A warning to only use expired or unregistered sims - you will have no warning when they have fixed the issue and you may quickly use your download credit and then be charged at $2/Mb from your recharge credit

    • I'm gonna chance it on my main, just because it happens to be the last day of my recharge cycle anyway.

      • That's OK if you have no credit built up - I've got a few hundred dollars of google play credit on my main sim that I transfered with creditme2u from cheap $5 sim cards, and I'd hate to lose it at the outrageous data rate of $2/MB.

        • Meh I could burn through 9GB of data right now and still have a gig left for the end of the month. It won't be the end of the world if I go over. Anyway, it's 10:47 and my unactivated prepaid sim still works!

  • If you needed to recharge during this period to rollover your credit, data, call or other inclusions, we will honor these balances.

    Yeah unlikely. They lost a lot of my data when they rolled over my credit and they can't figure it out even when i sent them the screenshots and walked them through the credit recharges on my account. Telstra employees are very incompetent.

    • What does this mean? My credit expires tomorrow night. Currently have 3.2Gb and $50 on my account (I think). I normally use #100# for credit me 2 u, but I cant do it. Does that mean my credit wont expire? or it will, but if I call and stay on the phone for 3 hrs I may be able to get it back.

      • I read it as if you've gotta call and wait 3 hours.

    • It took me about 90 minutes wait on live-chat and 45 mins getting the issue resolved today but it was resolved.

      I had 40$ of recharge credit reinstated which was wiped when unable to recharge or access their status page.

  • +1

    lets hope it takes all month to fix!

  • +10

    Did a Telstra employee trip over the plug again?

  • +5

    Still working as of 3pm with a prepaid SIM with no credit. Already downloaded about 30GB worth of games in my Steam library.

    • My steam downloads keep stopping and starting, decent speeds tho.

      • You might want to make sure your Steam client/connection settings are updated. My Steam downloads work perfectly fine on the Telstra network.

    • Give yourself a pat on the back!~

  • -7

    I'm not going to risk blowing all my credit away without a clear end date/time for this disruption, it's a really poor compensation package really.

    And for that reason it doesn't really make up for the amount of disruption caused.

    Maybe they could just fix the problems instead and not have outages, then I wouldn't have anything to complain about.

    • All the negative votes to cancel my Neg from those who didn't actually need the service during the outage. Why would I use it if I didn't need to be able to use it? It wasn't a short outage either.

  • I was wondering why the speeds were not as fast as usual. It is good that it isn't counting ;-), for now that is ;-(

    But yeah, I am just going use it as normal and anything extra during this time period will be free.

  • Well this was well timed. Needed to do some serious uploading.

  • You may not be able to see your credit or recharge but you can make domestic calls, SMS & access internet. Charges will not apply until this issue is resolved

    Telstra are sending this text message around currently.

    • +1

      Its prepaid, can't really charge anything past what you've already recharged with :)

      • Exaxtly, I have downloaded 5GB on steam at the moment even though my balance is a meager 300MB. Definitely a bargain :)

    • Didn't receive one so not too sure about this deal..

      • Telstra themselves said it as linked in the post.

  • +2

    Could be a false dawning. My balance just came back up. However, I cant complain. Had a pretty good run with Telstra over the last month with my $1 prepaid investment.

  • My prepaid is back up and running, beware all.

  • Unlimited data is great for me and for many Oabargainers with spare SIMS and 4G modems however this caused a massive drama in our house yesterday. My wife was at the Doctors with our sick son yesterday morning and desperately trying to get in touch with me to update and decide on next steps.

    My wife was walking around Bay Village shopping centre looking for a payphone while waiting for pharmacy to open.

    To make matters worse my wife was getting a message stating her credit had expired so you know who got an absolute dressing down when she got home. I was so relieved when I realised it was a Telstra issue and I hadn't messed up the scheduled recharge, which is scheduled for tomorrow so be interesting to see what happens to that.

    • +11

      Ok we get it, you have a wife.

    • +1

      Massive drama? We all used to survive without mobiles just fine. I'm sure a simple request to use the Dr phone under the circumstances would have been fine.

  • As a Telstra reseller customer on an unlimited plan, this holds nil value to me.
    What are you going to offer us?

    • +1

      If you have an unlimited plan, how has it impacted you?

      • +1

        Not being able to use the service for 1/2 day+

        • Oh ok. That wasn't mentioned in the original post

          UPDATE AS OF 12:40am MARCH 3, 2016
          We are aware of an issue that may be preventing some pre-paid customers from seeing their usage and recharging their account, including via the Telstra 24x7 app and MyAccount. Customers are also currently unable to make calls to overseas numbers. We are working to fix this as quickly as possible and we thank you for your patience.

          Only that ability to see usage and ability to recharge wasn't working

        • +1

          …the service is then free for the 1-2+ days, even if your credit expires.

        • @dyl: That's only a guess. Not official. It could be fixed at any time.

          Also are existing recharges being extended? That is the bare minimum they could do and there is no evidence that they are doing that.

          Mine and most customers' usage patterns are not going past what would already fit within the existing credit, so really it is like losing 1/2 day and getting nothing back at all

        • @The Land of Smeg:
          If it works on an unactivated boost sim, it'll more than likely work on other Telstra resellers. The only down side is you'll possibly have to recharge at an inconvenient time once it's fixed.
          I do understand what you're saying though, for an unlimited plan the potential saving is $2-5 for the few days, barely worth it for the inconvience of possibly needing to recharge at an awkward time and/or possibly having to go without a phone for a bit if you're somewhere where you can't recharge.

        • @dyl: So I'm about 7 days into a $40 recharge. If I go nuts down and then it's suddenly fixed and drains my balance, I'd lose 75% of the value - $30. At least with the previous outage they gave some clear timeframes for the free data (even if I already have enough home broadband it wasn't very useful except for uploads). This one I will need to go to the effort to buy a $2 SIM or get a free Blank SIM which by the time I get it, it could be fixed by then, and I wouldn't be able to be contacted on my own number it would be some other number that I'm using to get it for free. I already did all my uploads with the previous compensation package, it seems hardly worth it for this very vague offer.

        • @The Land of Smeg:

          Makes sense I guess, though you have to also consider you personally aren't affected majorly by the problem in the first place as you already have your recharge and beyond data usage (which can be monitored easily elsewhere) you have unlimited anyway - you don't overly need to check your credit often. As a compensation you aren't effected, so it's fair.

          As an abusable thing, $2 and five minutes of your time for unlimited 4G is quite decent. Even if you abuse it for an hour, that's 4-5GB easily (at my towns average rural speeds) - $30+ worth. Still nothing to complain about there.

        • Yeah I was personally majorly affected by the problem. I was unable to use the phone for 1/2 a day when I really needed it outside of home and found it very difficult to communicate at that time.

          Being on an "Unlimited" plan is no good if you can't use it when you need to. I paid for that unlimited for a certain amount of time (28 days or 30/31 days with auto recharge) and I deserve compensation at least for the time that I was not able to use that.

          It seems hardly worth the trouble for a "free 5GB" during an impractical time when I'm at home anyway with 12Mbps Unlimited ADSL which I could get down in 9 hours @ ~12Mbps ADSL compared to 3 hours @ ~36Mbps 4G.

          I don't even care about my personal circumstances. I am more concerned that a lot of less tech-savvy customers would have been screwed over with an outage, not being unable to contact customer service, not receiving a text message about the "free" usage, or receiving a text message about "free usage" but not about the end time of 10pm and blow through their allowances once 10pm hits. Not to mention customers who were not able to use it for more than a day because their balance expired (and could not recharge) before Telstra hit the "freeplay" switch.

          Telstra have dropped the ball again for the second time in 3 weeks and this "free usage" deal at a moments notice for a few hours is a slap in the face.

    • Unlimited 4G data is of no interest? wut

    • How can you be on an unlimited plan?! I didn't even know that exists. How much is it?

      • I think what he meant is the unlimited calls and texts plan. There is no unlimited data plan in the market

  • Is it meant to be only recharges that aren't working?
    24x7 app seems to be working here
    http://i.imgur.com/FQw5F84.png

    • The service is working intermittently. Try again shortly and it will likely be broken again

  • +1

    What if they lost all our Data balances?
    Will they just give us all 100 GB?

  • Possibly attempting to write off Google play credit liability from their books, fortunately I've kept an expired-balance SIM on hand.

  • I purchased a Telstra SIM at around lunchtime and activated it with no credit, and so far I'm sitting on 5GB on my Pocket Wi-Fi.

  • +1

    uploaded 10Gb of my photos to OneDrive and still uploading. I am using the old $2 simcard last time I bought to use free data on 14/02

  • Found an old telstra prepaid sim on the shelf, works fine. Don't need it was just curious.

  • +1

    SMS just went out, FREE til 10PM
    "Charging will start at 10pm AEDT"

    • Same, just got it. I have updated the post.

    • I'm glad to get some certainty but gosh that only gives me 3 hours (in the evening) to get "value" I hope they give something more than this to make up for 1/2 day outage. By the way I didn't even receive ANY SMS about ANY unmetered charges at all, they expect their customers to know this based on the message being sent to a few and then passed on through Whirlpool and OzBargain

      • Outrageous.

    • Good. Comes over as less of a ploy now.

    • That's a weird approach. I think a lot of people could get caught out with that.
      Say someone sets their phone to WiFi hotspot and miss the text - they could empty their balance or rack up huge charges. Until the end of the day would make a lot more sense in PR terms and more generally predictable.
      10 pm is a weird time and likely to cause problems.

    • +1

      I just keep using until disconnected as my sim card has zero credit.

  • love that thumbnail lol

  • Just got for this Prepaid service issue is now resolved. To

    apologise for the inconvenience you weren't charged while recharge was unavailable. Charging will start at 10pm AEDT.

  • seems like data is free with prepaid mobile broadband customers too :)

  • Well I have not been able to view my cable broadband usage for the past 1 week. This is beyond ridiculous. Telstra tech support are taking their time resolving the issue and I am getting furious. it has disappeared completely from my 24x7 app and 'my account service' via the web browser. Now I have absolutely no idea how much data I have remaining……..

  • I'm going to end the data session and reboot at 9:30 to make sure it doesn't carry the data forward.

  • I called then at 9am - operator said there as no known outages

    • not just a slow network while ozbargainer are raping the free data

  • In before they pull the plug

  • is the plugged pulled? I just stopped all of my linux isos.

    • My zero credit sim still seems to be working.. Hope they don't back charge me or something :-|

  • I got an easy 40GB out of that thanks OP

  • Still going strong at twenty past ten; 9GB.

  • 10:24PM, full steam ahead.

    • and here I was thinking it was 10pm local time (QLD), but clearly not.

  • still raping it

    • Nice verb selection there.

  • +3

    still goin strong here too.. 1st to 430gig wins a free ipad

  • +2

    Been using the unlimited 4G data & calls on nil balance SIM since early yesterday :-) Still free.

    • I know you know how to post a deal or two Bruce, ya coulda let us in on this deal - even with a forum post, we wouldn't have ruined it for you to much…cancel that I just read rps's post above.

      • Understand that ip ;-) But I barely had enough time to make much use of the freebie, let alone post this deal ;-(
        [Personal reasons - my Father is extremely ill in hospital. I'm his carer. So I've been a little distracted…]

        I only got around to checking OB last night. Was surprised it wasn't posted much earlier. Others also noticed it was available Wednesday but kept quiet.

        So I thought maybe it wasn't available to all. Didn't want the criticism of posting a forum / deal others couldn't access.

  • "Out of credit"

    Gameover. :(

  • That's all folks!

  • It's still going in QLD

  • Just stopped at 11:21pm here in Melbourne

  • My data usage is not showing again.
    Does that mean it's unlimited again?

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