Australia’s largest telecom company, Telstra, suffered a nationwide outage that disrupted phone service, train operations, and online payments. According to a report by the news agency Reuters, this outage has prompted the country’s Communications Minister Anika Wells to say the incident reflected why Australians have low trust in the telecommunications industry. However, Telstra later said the outage was caused by a software defect rather than a cyberattack, while the government confirmed an investigation would follow.“Telcos are the least trusted industry in our country as we stand today, and days like today demonstrate exactly why Australians feel that way. It will be up to Telstra to make things right,” Wells told Reuters.Last year, the Australian government increased penalties for telecommunications companies that fail to ensure emergency calls connect, raising the maximum penalty to A$30 million.Apart from the telecom minister, Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese described the incident as a national disruption and said the government would work with Telstra as it investigated the cause.“This is deeply concerning. It is very disruptive to people’s lives throughout the country. This is a national outage that has had varied effects,” Albanese told reporters.
Telstra says software glitch disrupted emergency calls and transport
Telstra said the outage was triggered by a defect affecting specialised servers responsible for time synchronisation at its data centres in Sydney and Melbourne. Chief Financial Officer Michael Ackland said the company had isolated the issue and was confident it was caused by a software defect.“We are still conducting our investigation into the root cause, but we are confident we have identified a software defect. We’ve been able to isolate it,” Ackland told Reuters.He added that there was no evidence that the outage resulted from a cyberattack. The network failure affected more customers than initially believed, disrupting mobile services nationwide and preventing some emergency calls from connecting. More than 300 welfare checks were carried out for customers whose calls failed, with six people referred to emergency services.“We let customers down today in their hour of need. There’s nothing that makes that untrue for many of those customers who are in traumatic situations, and we apologise for that deeply,” Ackland mentioned.
Trains, taxi payments and businesses affected
The outage also disrupted transport and businesses that relied on Telstra’s network. Regional train services connecting Melbourne with towns across Victoria were suspended because of communication issues, while some rail services in New South Wales were also affected. Taxi drivers reported losing fares after electronic payment systems stopped working, and some passengers were unable to pay for their journeys.Mark Whitbread, who owns a café in the rural town of Bega, told ABC Radio that he lost sales because his business relied on a self-service point-of-sale system that could not process transactions during the outage.
