In brief
- Telstra appears to be experiencing a widespread service crash across the country.
- Tens of thousands of users have reported issues with their mobile and internet services since Wednesday morning.
Australia's largest telecommunications company, Telstra, has experienced a major outage on Wednesday morning affecting thousands of customers right across the country.
The entire regional Victorian train network has been impacted by the outage, with passengers on V/Line trains urged to find alternative routes.
The Minister for Emergency Management, Kristy McBain, has confirmed that there is an outage of Telstra services affecting a "large number" of calls and connections.
"We understand Telstra is working on resolving the issues," McBain said.
"Australian phones are also required to fall back to other networks for 000 access."
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Users began reporting issues with their internet and mobile services before 5am on the outage-tracking website DownDetector.
Telstra said it is investigating the cause of the problem.
"We're looking into an issue affecting some mobile calls and data connections," a spokesperson for the telco giant told SBS News.
The company advised users to try restarting their devices or WiFi services if they are affected by the outage.
"We're on it," the company added, thanking users for "bearing with" it.
No information has been provided so far on the number of users impacted is not yet known. The cause of the outage has also not yet been identified.
Dozens of train services stopped dead on the tracks and remain stationary at regional and suburban Melbourne stations, The Age reports. Around 70,000 Victorians use V/Line trains every day.
McBain confirmed that the issue is impacting Victoria's regional train services.
Customers furious
Irate customers on social media berated the company following the outage, with several claiming that some devices they own were functioning fine while others were failing to connect to service networks.
Some claimed that their businesses were affected by the outage while others demanded further updates from the company some two hours after the impacts were first felt.
Tens of thousands reported issues with outages on the DownDetector site, beginning at 4.15am and spiking at 6.30am. Reports have since declined.
Comments and complaints flooded into the website from across every state and territory, with both regional and metropolitan areas reportedly affected.
Some users reported not being able to use emergency services.
Telstra experienced a highly-publicised major system failure in March 2024 which disrupted emergency service lines.
That issue was due to a technical fault which caused a failure to pass information to emergency services.
In June, Telstra cut its mobile network coverage area by almost a third as new rules came into effect, forcing telcos to measure and report signal strength.
The changes standardized measurements across networks, making it easier for customers to compare them.
Telstra resolved the 2024 incident in an hour and a half; however, a Victorian man died after his family's emergency calls were delayed during his cardiac arrest.
The company, which provides some 24.9 million retail mobile services, was fined $3 million following a probe into the outage. New laws were also implemented to force Telcos to proactively provide updates during outages.
This is a breaking story and will be updated with further details soon.
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