A major outage at Australia’s largest telecommunications company has led to the cancellation of train services, left thousands of customers without mobile coverage and sparked an investigation into unconnected emergency calls.
Telstra chief financial officer Michael Ackland apologized for the issue which began at 4:30am local time on Wednesday and affected “some mobile calls and data services”.
Services were fully restored about 12 hours later, he said. A software fault linked to timing servers at the Sydney and Melbourne data centers was to blame, not a cyberattack, Ackland added.
Australian 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 telecommunications company conducted wellness checks on customers who called emergency services during the outage, six of whom needed immediate help.
Backup systems, which redirect emergency calls to other mobile carriers, have largely worked as they should, he added.
Asked if the country could still rely on its largest mobile network, Ackland said: “Australia can absolutely trust its largest telecommunications company… we take these outages very, very seriously.
“Our investment in the resilience, cybersecurity and redundancy of our network is important, but it is a large and complex network and from time to time problems arise.”
confirmed that welfare checks were being carried out for around three dozen unsuccessful calls to emergency services, but that the “basic triple zero system remained operational”.
Communications Minister Anika Wells said the country’s telecommunications regulator, the Australian Communication and Media Authority, would investigate the outage.
In Victoria, all regional train services were canceled due to the outage, while some regional services in New South Wales were also disrupted. Domestic freight services have also been affected.
Payment systems were also down, with around 80,000 businesses using the Tyro app affected.
Last September, a system failure at Optus – Australia’s second largest telecommunications company – has left three people dead after hundreds of people in more than half the country were unable to call emergency services for 13 hours.
Optus was also fined after a breakdown in 2023 thousands of people were unable to call emergency services.