A major outage at Telstra, Australia's largest telecommunications company, has cancelled train services, left thousands without mobile coverage, and sparked an investigation after emergency calls failed to connect. The disruption began at 04:30 local time on Wednesday, with services fully restored about 12 hours later.
Telstra's chief financial officer Michael Ackland apologised, blaming a software defect in time-keeping servers at data centres in Sydney and Melbourne. He confirmed it was not a cyber attack. Australia's Prime Minister Anthony Albanese described the outage as "deeply concerning".
“Telstra outage cancels trains, disrupts emergency calls; software defect blamed, investigation launched.”
Telstra said the impact was "national" but described the outage as "intermittent". Ackland revealed that the company had conducted welfare checks on customers who had called emergency services during the outage, with six requiring immediate help. He added that back-up systems, which divert emergency calls through other mobile carriers, largely worked as they should.
When asked if the country could still rely on its largest mobile network, Ackland insisted: "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 said the country's telco regulator, the Australian Communication and Media Authority, will investigate the outage. 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 using the Tyro app were down, affecting about 80,000 businesses.
The incident comes after a systems outage at Optus, the second largest telecoms company in Australia, last September led to three deaths when hundreds of people across more than half the country could not call emergency services for 13 hours. Optus was also fined after a 2023 outage left thousands unable to call emergency services.
