Hundreds of thousands of Telstra subscribers were without home phone and Internet services on Friday, and many customers around Australia were still without services on Sunday.

“We understand this has been frustrating for affected customers and we will be providing them with some additional data,” Telstra said.

It was the fourth major Telstra service outage in as many months, and came just a day after Telstra chief executive Andy Penn told a business gathering the company had worked hard on customer service.

But for customers who lose business, free data is no compensation.

“We have enough data, so free data for a day means absolutely nothing,” said Howlong’s Jodie Homer.

"It means absolutely nothing, we never run out of data, but we need to be able to run the business though.

“They are missing the point by offering free data. They're are not getting the fact that businesses need a connected service to operate, so data is nothing."

Ms Homer runs online consulting business FiPPeT which helps small business operators and tradesmen set up digital platforms.

She has clients all over Australia and had to reschedule a consultation.

"I'm lucky my client was OK with it on Friday,” she said.

"It's not a good look when you have to ring clients and say to them, 'look I can't do this meeting today, we'll have to do it Monday' because the product I'm selling and using is an on-line system and it's not a good look if you can't use it."

Ms Homer, who said she rarely experienced service problems before switching from ADSL to the NBN, said a more genuine form of compensation would be to waive bills.

Friday’s outage affected access to NBN, ADSL and landline phone services.

Telstra’s service status said there was scheduled maintenance of its public switched telephone network scheduled for between May 20 and May 25, which would affect some home phone voice and data services.

Customers from Beechworth, Jindera, Barnawartha, Wodonga, Wangaratta and Albury joined thousands across Australia who took aim at Telstra on social media at the weekend.

“We have made significant progress overnight with restoration efforts and appreciate residual issues are taking longer than expected to resolve,” Telstra said on its Crowdsupport forum at 11:47am on Sunday.

While service returned to normal for most on the Border by Saturday, many subscribers were still offline on Sunday.

Mr Penn told Fairfax Media a review of "every aspect of the network" had been carried out which confirmed its "incredible strength and resilience". 

He said Telstra would spend $25 million upgrading network monitoring tools and $25 million to speed up network recovery time.