A major outage at Australia’s largest telecommunications company has led to cancelled train services, left thousands of customers without mobile coverage, and sparked an investigation into emergency calls that were not connected.
Telstra’s chief financial officer Michael Ackland apologised for the issue which began at 04:30 local time on Wednesday and affected “some mobile calls and data services”.
About six hours later, 90% of the network had been restored, he said. Time-keeping servers at data centres in Sydney and Melbourne were to blame but the exact cause was unknown. It was not a suspected cyber attack.
Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the outage was “deeply concerning”.
Telstra described the outage as “intermittent” but acknowledged the impact had been “national”.
Ackland said the telecoms company was conducting welfare checks on customers who had called emergency services during the outage.
“We don’t believe this issue has impacted triple zero in the same way as other calls,” he said.
“It uses different network settings, but we are continuing to investigate every angle on where it may have impacted triple zero if that has occurred.”
Asked if the country could still rely on its largest mobile network, Ackland said: “Australia can absolutely have faith in its biggest telco… we take these outages very very seriously.
“Our investment in resilience and cyber security and redundancy in our network is significant but it is a big and complex network and from time to time, issues do occur.”
Communications Minister Anika Wells confirmed that welfare checks were being made for about three dozen calls to emergency services that did not go through but that the “core triple-zero system remains operational”.
She also said the country’s telco regulator, the Australian Communication and Media Authority, will investigate the outage.
In Victoria, all regional train services were cancelled due to the outage while some regional services in New South Wales were also disrupted. National freight services were also affected.
Payment systems were also down with about 80,000 businesses using the Tyro app affected.
Last September, a systems outage at Optus – the second largest telecoms company in Australia – led to three deaths after hundreds of people across more than half the country were unable to call emergency services for 13 hours.
Optus was also fined after an outage in 2023 left thousands unable to call emergency services.
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