Updated ,first published
Telstra is checking on customers who could not reach Triple Zero as a result of the national outage on Wednesday morning that it blamed on a timekeeping fault deep within its network.
The telco’s chief financial officer, Michael Ackland, said a group of network “nodes” that keep time synchronised across the mobile network had stopped working as they should from about 4.30am AEST, causing intermittent call and data failures across the country.
He claimed about 90 per cent of calls and data services were working again by late morning, but could not say what had caused the fault, when full service would return, how many customers were affected and whether everyone whose calls to Triple Zero failed were safe. Ackland would not commit to compensating customers who had been affected.
“Our focus at the moment is absolutely on getting things up and running and we will deal with our customers post the event, as we will work with government and regulators on any other action,” he said.
The affected nodes were servers housed in two Telstra data centres in Melbourne and Sydney, Ackland said. There was nothing to indicate malicious activity, Ackland said, despite suggestions from One Nation that a foreign power could be involved.
Ackland fronted the media for a short press conference on Wednesday in place of chief executive, Vicki Brady, who is on annual leave.
Several state police forces issued statement on Wednesday morning warning that while the Triple Zero system itself was not affected, people “may not be able to reach Triple Zero if you are calling from a Telstra device”. Police told anyone who could not get through to try another device, a landline or Wi-Fi calling, or to ask neighbours or friends nearby. Under the emergency-call rules, a phone with no signal is meant to reach Triple Zero over another carrier’s network. The police warnings suggested that safeguard was not always working.
Ackland said emergency calls ran on different network settings and were “not impacted in the same way” as other calls, but that Telstra was investigating a small number of reports of failed calls. The network was checking on anyone whose call did not connect.
Asked whether anyone had died after being unable to reach the emergency line, he said he had no information to share.
The outage also brought down Victoria’s entire regional passenger rail network. V/Line said all its services had stopped after a radio network fault, leaving dozens of trains stationary at regional stations and on Melbourne’s suburban fringe.
About 70,000 people use V/Line each day. Passengers were told to defer travel where possible, with only very limited replacement coaches running and no estimate for when services would resume.
The rail disruption crossed the border into New South Wales, where regional and some intercity trains were also delayed. Transport for NSW said “significant delays are expected to all services” because of the outage and urged passengers to allow extra time or defer travel. Suburban Sydney Trains and Metro services appeared unaffected.
The federal government said it had been advised of the outage by Telstra. Emergency Management Minister Kristy McBain said the government was aware of the impact on V/Line and that arrangements were being made for affected passengers.
“The Australian government has been advised by Telstra that there is an outage affecting a large number of mobile calls and connections,” McBain said in a statement. She said Telstra was working to resolve the issue.
McBain said Australian phones were required to fall back to other carriers’ networks to reach Triple Zero, and that Telstra, like all telcos, must notify customers and emergency services of any major outage. It was not clear on Wednesday morning whether that fallback was working for all affected customers.
There were also issues being reported with other providers who rely on Telstra’s wholesale mobile network, including mobile virtual network operators such as Boost Mobile, Belong, Aldi Mobile and Tangerine Telecom.
Payment systems were also caught up. Ackland said card-payments provider Tyro, which many businesses use to process transactions, had gone down during the outage.
The Australian Communications Consumer Action Network, the peak body for communications consumers, said the outage showed Australia still had no enforceable reliability standards to hold carriers to account for network stability. Its chief executive, Carol Bennett, said Telstra needed to explain “what has happened, who is affected, and when services will be restored”.
Telstra slashed the size of its claimed mobile network coverage by almost a third at the end of June as new rules forcing telcos to measure and report signal strength came into force, standardising methodologies across networks to make it easier for consumers to compare.
The telco provided about 24.9 million retail mobile services as of June last year, according to the company’s most recent figures. It was fined more than $3 million in 2024 over an earlier outage that stopped some customers reaching Tripe Zero.
The federal government has also signalled tougher performance standards for how the major carriers handle Triple Zero calls.
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David Swan is the technology editor for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. He was previously technology editor for The Australian newspaper.Connect via X or email.
Jack Gramenz is a breaking news reporter at The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via email.
