Telstra outage hits transport and payment services across Australia

Telstra said it was investigating reports of failed emergency calls and conducting welfare checks on customers affected by the outage. (Reuters pic)

SYDNEY: Australia’s biggest telecoms firm Telstra said it was urgently investigating the cause of a nationwide outage on Wednesday that cut phone services for thousands of customers, disrupted wireless payments and halted trains.

Issues involving networking equipment at Telstra’s data centres in Sydney and Melbourne may have caused the outage, CFO Michael Ackland said, adding that there was no evidence of a cyberattack or malicious interference.

“At this stage, we have nothing to indicate malicious activity … but we continue to investigate, we continue to remain curious and explore every avenue. But we have nothing on that,” Ackland told reporters.

“We know that customers across the whole community rely on our connectivity, and this network challenge has caused many issues and it’s been a big disruption to many people’s days, and we apologise for that.”

About 90% of services have been restored. The outage lasted roughly five hours for many customers.

Prime minister Anthony Albanese said his government would work closely with Telstra as it investigated the outage.

“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.

Train services connecting Melbourne, Australia’s second-largest city, to regional towns were suspended due to communication issues and the operator advised passengers to defer travel where possible. Some trains on the New South Wales state rural lines were also disrupted.

Around 400 traffic lights in Adelaide were affected and that may cause some congestion on roads, though public transport is not affected, the boss of South Australia state’s transport department, Jon Whelan, told ABC Radio.

As payment platforms went down, taxi drivers lost work and some customers found themselves unable to pay for their rides. The outage also affected cafes, restaurants and small businesses, Australian media reported.

The Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman urged small businesses to keep detailed records of the outage’s effect on their customers and business partners, and any losses incurred.

Telstra said it was investigating reports of failed calls to Australia’s primary emergency number during the outage and was conducting welfare checks on customers who could not connect to the emergency number.

An issue with a network firewall upgrade triggered a 13-hour outage last year at Australia’s second-largest telco Optus, owned by Singapore Telecommunications, disrupting emergency call services and possibly causing four deaths.