Six people required immediate welfare checks after a major outage at Australia’s largest telecommunications company left emergency calls unconnected, cancelled train services and plunged thousands into mobile blackout.
The fault, which began at 04:30 local time on Wednesday, was caused by a software defect in time-keeping servers at data centres in Sydney and Melbourne, Telstra’s chief financial officer Michael Ackland said. It was not a cyber attack.
“Six required help after emergency calls failed during a 12-hour Telstra outage that cancelled trains and hit thousands.”
Services were fully restored about 12 hours later, but Ackland apologised for the disruption, which he acknowledged had been “national” in scale. Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese described the outage as “deeply concerning”.
Telstra said it conducted welfare checks on customers who had called emergency services during the disruption, with six requiring immediate help. Back-up systems, which divert emergency calls through other mobile carriers, largely worked as they should, Ackland added.
“Australia can absolutely have faith in its biggest telco… we take these outages very very seriously,” Ackland said. “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.”
In Victoria, all regional train services were cancelled, while some regional services in New South Wales were also disrupted. National freight services were affected, and payment systems were down, hitting about 80,000 businesses using the Tyro app.
Communications Minister Anika Wells said the country’s telecoms regulator, the Australian Communication and Media Authority, will investigate the outage.
The incident follows a far more severe outage at Telstra’s rival Optus last September, when systems failed for 13 hours, leaving hundreds unable to call emergency services. Three deaths were linked to that blackout, and Optus was later fined.
