Callers trying to contact Centrelink have been met with "busy" signals 28 million times in just seven months.
The figure falls just short of the entire previous year and is six million more than two years ago.
For those who do get through, average call waiting times for the welfare agency have blown out by two-and-a-half minutes since October.
Centrelink's average call wait time stands at 14 minutes and 10 seconds.
But a peculiar quirk has emerged in how the agency calculates the figure.
If a call is answered and then transferred to another operator, the time the caller spends languishing on hold is wound back to zero.
"A transfer to a new line becomes a new inquiry, and as such, the clock would start again," Human Services staffer Barry Jackson told a Senate estimates hearing in Canberra on Thursday.
"It becomes a new call coming into the system."
Labor senator Louise Pratt pressed the Centrelink boss on the issue.
"So you don't add the two times together as an illustration of the total time someone has been on the phone?" she asked.
Human Services head Kathryn Campbell said Centrelink's first priority is to ensure callers are placed in the right queue and their questions are answered by the first operator to respond.
"If we do a transfer on those occasions the wait time is recommenced but we work very hard to make sure we don't do that," Ms Campbell told senators.
There have also been 4.1 million abandoned calls so far this financial year, compared to 7.1 million in 2015-16.
Greens Senator Rachel Siewert said the "astronomical" number of busy signals could reflect people trying to get through to fix incorrect debts.
"Behind those 28 million attempts are exasperated and struggling Australians. It should not be this hard to access Centrelink, the government should wake up to how broken the system is," she said.
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