Like many people, David Lingard’s mobile phone didn’t work for four days earlier this month and unable to call Telstra to find out why he spoke to a customer service operator through an online chat tool.

“I really apologise for the inconvenience, David,” the operator wrote. “I’ve checked your location and I confirmed that we’re having an on-going (sic) network upgrade activity in your area which is affecting your phone service.”

However, when Telstra finally restored services days later, a spokeswoman said it was a hardware fault, not an upgrade, that was to blame.

Mr Lingard said it was strange that Australia’s biggest telecommunications company couldn’t communicate internally what was going on with Harden.

“They had all weekend to get a response right,” Mr Lingard said.

“We didn’t see any Telstra trucks in town and it became an item of gossip, businesses said they lost a lot of money from tourists and locals.”

Screenshots of Mr Lingard’s chat were sent to Telstra and a spokeswoman said a member of the “24x7” (chat service) staff had used the wrong terminology. She confirmed the four-day outage was due to a hardware failure and said if any works were planned the public would be informed.

But for people like Mr Lingard, the admission wasn’t good enough.

“We know several elderly people who only have cheap mobile phones now for an emergency, they can’t get online to find out what’s going on like I can,” he said.

“If they knew something was broken, why didn’t they come straight out and fix it on day two?”

Telstra area manager Chris Taylor apologised to the community for the outage, thanking them for their patience and said customers were welcome to call 132 200 to discuss their individual situations.