Trains and emergency calls affected after major outage at Australia’s largest telecoms company
A widespread network outage at Australia’s largest telecommunications provider disrupted train services, cut off mobile coverage for thousands of customers and prompted an investigation into emergency calls that failed to connect.
Telstra’s Chief Financial Officer, Michael Ackland, apologised for the disruption, which began at about 4:30 a.m. local time on Wednesday and affected some mobile voice and data services across the country.
He said services were fully restored roughly 12 hours later, explaining that the outage was caused by a software fault involving time-synchronisation servers at the company’s data centres in Sydney and Melbourne, rather than a cyberattack.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese described the incident as “deeply concerning”.
Although Telstra initially characterised the disruption as intermittent, the company acknowledged that its effects were felt nationwide.
Ackland said Telstra had carried out welfare checks on customers who attempted to contact emergency services during the outage, with six people found to require urgent assistance.
He added that backup systems designed to reroute emergency calls through other mobile networks functioned as intended in most cases.
Responding to concerns about the reliability of Australia’s largest telecommunications network, Ackland said the public could continue to have confidence in Telstra.
“Australia can absolutely have faith in its biggest telco… we take these outages very, very seriously,” he said.
He noted that the company has made substantial investments in network resilience, cybersecurity and redundancy, but acknowledged that occasional issues can arise due to the complexity of its infrastructure.
Authorities also confirmed that welfare checks were being conducted for about three dozen emergency calls that did not connect, while stressing that Australia’s core triple-zero emergency system remained operational.
Communications Minister Anika Wells announced that the Australian Communications and Media Authority would investigate the outage.
The disruption had widespread consequences beyond telecommunications. In the state of Victoria, all regional train services were suspended, while some regional rail operations in New South Wales also experienced delays. National freight services were similarly affected.
Electronic payment systems were also impacted, with around 80,000 businesses using the Tyro payment platform experiencing service disruptions.
The incident follows previous major telecommunications failures in Australia. In September last year, an outage at Optus, the country’s second-largest telecoms provider, prevented hundreds of people across more than half the country from reaching emergency services for 13 hours, an incident linked to three deaths.
Optus was also fined after a separate outage in 2023 left thousands of customers unable to contact emergency services.
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