Telstra Nationwide Outage Disrupts Calls, Trains, and Payments Across Australia
Published
Key Takeaways
- Outage Confirmed: Telstra is investigating a nationwide outage that cut phone services, disrupted wireless payments, and impacted trains.
- Triple-zero Impacted: Communications Minister confirmed some calls to Australia's emergency number were affected.
- Service Restored: The outage lasted roughly five hours, with about 90% of services restored by mid-morning.
Telstra, Australia's biggest telecommunications company, said on Wednesday it was urgently investigating the cause of a nationwide outage that cut phone services for thousands of customers, disrupted wireless payments, and halted trains.
A fault involving specialised servers that manage time synchronisation at Telstra's data centres in Sydney and Melbourne may have caused the outage, Chief Financial Officer Michael Ackland said.
Telstra Traces Outage to Time Synchronisation Servers
The Telstra disruption began in the early hours of Wednesday, around 4:30 a.m., and lasted roughly five hours, with about 90% of services since restored, according to Reuters. More than 7,000 complaints were logged on outage-tracking site Downdetector at its peak. The outage impacted:
- Trains
- Services connecting Melbourne to regional towns, affecting V/Line,
- New South Wales regional trains, including in the Hunter region and southwest of Sydney
- Payment provider Tyro reported hampered EFTPOS transactions,
- Self-service point-of-sale systems,
- EV charging network Chargefox said a small number of its more than 2,200 charging plugs went offline,
- Triple-zero emergency services.
Telstra sub-brands Belong and Boost and Aldi Mobile, which operates on the Telstra Network, also experienced issues, reports say. As payment platforms failed, taxi and cafes reported being affected.
Australia’s Communications Minister Anika Wells confirmed some triple-zero emergency calls were impacted during the outage. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called the incident "deeply concerning."
"At this stage, we have nothing to indicate malicious activity; but we continue to investigate," he told reporters.
ACMA to Investigate Telstra Outage
Telstra said it was conducting welfare checks, and the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) announced it would conduct a full investigation into how and why the outage occurred.
Ackland noted the outage was intermittent and could affect any routed call regardless of state or region.
The incident follows last year's 13-hour Optus outage that possibly caused four deaths. Australian Information Commissioner announced last year that Optus, owned by Singapore Telecommunications, was facing a 2022 data breach lawsuit.
In February, the UNC3886 cyber espionage group was linked to Singapore Telecom infrastructure cyberattacks on Singtel, StarHub, M1, and Simba Telecom.
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