Australia: Telecom outage in Australia has disrupted transport services, emergency calls, and mobile networks, following a major failure at the country’s largest provider.
The disruption has lasted around 12 hours before services have been fully restored. The outage at Telstra Corporation Limited (Telstra) has begun at 04:30 local time and has affected mobile calls and data services nationwide.
Telstra Chief Financial Officer, Michael Ackland, stated that the failure has been caused by a software defect linked to time-keeping servers at data centres in Sydney and Melbourne. Ackland clarified that the incident has not been related to a cyber attack.
Telecom outage has disrupted multiple sectors, cancelling regional trains in Victoria, interrupting services in New South Wales, delaying freight operations, and affecting emergency services, with six cases requiring immediate assistance while backup systems have largely worked.
The Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, described the incident as ‘deeply concerning’. Communications Minister, Anika Wells, confirmed that the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) will investigate the outage. Authorities have also reviewed about three dozen emergency calls that failed to connect. The core triple-zero emergency system has remained operational.
The outage has extended to business operations. Around 80,000 businesses using the Tyro payment platform have faced service disruptions. Payment systems have been temporarily unavailable during the incident.
Ackland has stated that Australia can continue to rely on its largest telecom provider. Ackland has added that the company has invested heavily in network resilience and redundancy. Ackland has acknowledged that complex systems can face occasional technical issues.
The incident has drawn comparisons with a major outage involving Optus in 2023. That event had left large parts of the country without service and had contributed to three deaths after emergency calls failed over a 13-hour period. Optus has later faced regulatory penalties over the disruption.
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