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Today we pray for the poor bloke who caused Telstra's nationwide outage.

Think you’ve had a bad day? Not compared to one poor Telstra worker.

In case you missed it (which you may have if you spent the day outdoors making daisy chains or you’re with one of the country’s many other mobile service providers), Telstra experienced a nationwide network outage yesterday.

For some, it was a bleak reminder of the fragility of digital life, for others it was an opportunity to make some truly incredible gags on social media.

For the singular engineer whose fault it was, it probably doesn’t get much worse.

More than 16 million services were disrupted by what the company has labelled “an embarrassing human error”, which plunged customers into two hours of phoneless chaos (or gave them a chance to look out the window).

Apparently, the poor sod responsible reconnected customers to a faulty “node”, which had a “flow-on consequence”. (Ie. he plugged a thing into the wrong thing and somehow took out the nation’s largest mobile network.)

You had one job, mate.

The engineer has now been identified and will thankfully keep his job, which he should, because mistakes happen in the workplace, especially on Tuesday mornings.

“We took that node down,” Telstra’s COO Kate McKenzie explained to reporters on Tuesday.

“Unfortunately the individual that was managing that issue did not follow the correct procedure, and he reconnected the customers to the malfunctioning node, rather than transferring them to the nine other redundant nodes that he should have transferred people to.

“We apologise right across our customer base. This is an embarrassing human error.”

The main things for disgruntled customers to remember here are: a) the phones went down and we kept on keeping on and b) we will be compensated with free data for the whole day on Sunday.

Also, the smart phone-pocalypse loomed and we survived.