Australia’s largest telecommunications provider, Telstra, has apologised after a nationwide network outage disrupted train services, interrupted emergency calls and left thousands of customers without mobile and data connectivity.
The outage began at about 4:30 a.m. local time on Wednesday, affecting mobile calls and data services across the country. Full services were restored roughly 12 hours later after engineers identified and fixed the problem.
Michael Ackland, Telstra Chief Financial Officer said the disruption was caused by a software defect linked to time-keeping servers at the company’s data centres in Sydney and Melbourne, stressing that the incident was not the result of a cyberattack.
The outage had widespread consequences, forcing the cancellation of all regional train services in the state of Victoria, disrupting some regional rail operations in New South Wales and affecting national freight services.
Emergency services were also impacted. Ackland said backup systems designed to reroute emergency calls through other mobile networks functioned in most cases, but six customers who attempted to contact emergency services required immediate welfare checks after their calls were disrupted.
“We take these outages very, very seriously,” Ackland said, adding that the company has invested heavily in network resilience, cybersecurity and redundancy despite the complexity of operating Australia’s largest telecommunications network.
Anthony Albanese, Australian Prime Minister, described the incident as “deeply concerning,” while Communications Minister Anika Wells announced that the Australian Communications and Media Authority would investigate the outage.
Beyond telecommunications, the disruption also affected businesses. Around 80,000 merchants using the Tyro payment platform experienced payment processing problems during the outage.
The incident revives concerns about the resilience of Australia’s telecommunications infrastructure following a major outage at Optus in September last year. That disruption lasted about 13 hours, prevented many Australians from reaching emergency services and was later linked to three deaths. Optus was subsequently fined over a separate 2023 outage that also affected emergency calling services.
