Following an anonymous Telstra spokesperson issuing an apology on behalf of Telstra to its customers this morning for yesterday’s nationwide Telstra mobile outage, I wondered at the end of the article where Telstra CEO Andrew Penn was in relation to this massive screwup.

After all, when Apple suffered its Antennagate issue, no less than Steve Jobs fronted up to apologise. Then, when Apple had its Mapsgate issue, Tim Cook took the initiative to apologise too - and even sacked a top Apple executive over the matter.

Well, I’ve no idea whether my musings had anything to do with it or not - presumably it had nothing to do with Penn’s actions - but I noticed just minutes ago that Penn had indeed penned the apology I thought should have arrived in my inbox (and those of all mainstream and tech journalists as well as Telstra customers) this morning, rather than from a spokesperson who did not want to be named.

The apology from Andrew Penn is at Telstra’s Exchange blog, and is entitled: “Update on our mobile network disruption and free data day.”

Andrew Penn’s statement is reprinted in full below, please read on.

I first noticed this apology thanks to a Tweet from Telstra News, which I embed below above Penn's full statement. 

On behalf of everyone at @Telstra, I am sorry and deeply disappointed about last night's service disruption https://t.co/GOXmmtXtep

— Andrew Penn (@andy_penn) March 17, 2016

 Andrew Penn states all of the below:

“About half of our mobile customers experienced disruption to their voice and data services during yesterday evening. On behalf of everyone at Telstra, I am very sorry and deeply disappointed this happened.

“We are still investigating how the service disruption occurred, but our early findings show we had a problem that triggered a significant number of customers to be disconnected from the network, and as they were all automatically reconnecting at the same time, this caused congestion.

“At Telstra we place the highest priority on getting things right for our customers. Our mobile network is a vital part of the nation’s infrastructure and it carries millions of calls and data connections for our customers every day.

“Mobile phones and other mobile devices have become critical parts of our lives and our customers rightly have high expectations of us. We invest billions of dollars a year to meet and exceed these expectations and provide our customers with the best mobile experience in the country.

“That is why it is so disappointing for us to have let down our customers.

“We will be offering all of our mobile customers another free day of data as a way of making this right. This will be on Sunday 3 April 2016. Customers do not need to do anything to receive the free data.

“While this is unrelated to a network outage last month, the congestion caused by people reconnecting to the network was similar. Following the last event we started a major process and engineering review of the network, which includes global network experts, to understand how it occurred. We will add the lessons learned from this incident to that review.

“Once again I apologise for any inconvenience we have caused. You expect seamless mobile service with Telstra and it is our responsibility to ensure that is delivered day in, day out.

“Andy”.