On Monday April 28, Telstra’s BigPond and Telstra Mail services fell over — hard. From early afternoon, thousands of Australians found themselves locked out of their emails. Couldn’t log in via webmail, couldn’t connect through Outlook or Apple Mail. Just dead in the water.
What Happened?
Telstra didn’t say much. The outage kicked off around 3:00 PM AEST. By 7:00 PM they claimed it was fixed — but plenty of users were still locked out, especially those using email clients like Outlook. The so-called “fix” didn’t land for everyone.
Who Did It Affect?
Everyone from home users to business owners trying to run their day. One small business operator said he was on hold for over 90 minutes with no explanation — just silence while his invoices sat unsent and customers went ignored.
That’s not just an inconvenience — that’s real business damage.
Telstra’s Advice? Pretty Thin.
Once Telstra showed up online, their suggestions were the usual boilerplate:
- Reset your password
- Try webmail instead of Outlook
- Reconfigure your email client
- Contact support if all else fails (good luck with that queue)
None of this addressed the elephant in the room — how does a major provider still have single points of failure like this in 2025?
If You’re Still Locked Out, Try This:
- Use Webmail: Go to email.telstra.com
- Reset Your Password: Yes, even if you already know it. Just do it.
- Remove and Re-Add Your Account: In Outlook or Apple Mail, start fresh.
- Still no luck? You’ll need to brave Telstra support or wait it out.
Final Thoughts
This outage showed just how fragile some of our biggest digital services still are. And how little accountability we get when things go sideways. If you rely on BigPond for anything important — personal or professional — it might be time to consider a more modern, stable alternative.
Telstra’s official outage page is here, for what it’s worth: telstra.com.au/outages