Major Telstra outage disrupts trains and emergency calls across Australia

Australia's largest telecommunications company has restored services after an intermittent outage that disrupted mobile coverage, cancelled train services and prompted checks on emergency calls that did not connect. The incident began at 04:30 local time on Wednesday and lasted for about 12 hours before services were fully restored. The company said the impact was national, affecting customers across Australia.

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Telstra's chief financial officer, Michael Ackland, said the problem was caused by software defects linked to time-keeping servers at data centres in Sydney and Melbourne. He said the issue was not the result of a cyberattack. The company said it had carried out welfare checks on customers who had tried to contact emergency services during the outage, and that six people required immediate help.

The outage also affected transport and payment systems. In Victoria, all regional train services were cancelled, while some regional services in New South Wales were also disrupted. National freight services were affected as well.

Payment systems were also down, with about 80,000 businesses using the Tyro app affected, adding to the wider disruption. The incident has renewed concern about the resilience of Australia's communications networks and the reliability of emergency-call systems. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese described the outage as deeply concerning.

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Communications Minister Anika Wells said the Australian Communications and Media Authority would investigate the outage, underlining the regulatory scrutiny now facing the company. The company said back-up systems that divert emergency calls through other mobile carriers largely worked as intended, and that the core triple-zero system remained operational. Even so, Telstra confirmed that welfare checks were being made for about three dozen calls to emergency services that did not go through.

The outage comes after a major systems failure at another large Australian telecoms company last September, when emergency calls were disrupted for 13 hours and the incident later led to deaths. What remains unclear is how many customers were affected in total and whether any further failures will be identified in the network's time-keeping systems. The regulator's investigation is expected to examine the technical cause, the handling of emergency calls and the effectiveness of back-up arrangements.

The episode is likely to intensify pressure on telecoms operators to demonstrate that critical services can withstand large-scale technical faults.

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