Updated ,first published
Telstra was urgently investigating a second network fault on Wednesday night that was stopping some calls from connecting, including to Triple Zero, hours after the telco said it had resolved the outage that crippled its mobile services for much of the day.
In a statement issued about 9.30pm AEST on Wednesday, Telstra said that while it had fixed the fault behind the daytime outage, it had identified a “secondary issue” affecting some calls, including to Triple Zero.
People calling Triple Zero might hear an error message while their phone tried to connect to another mobile network, the company said. It urged anyone who could not get through to wait up to 90 seconds for their phone to switch networks. If that were to fail, Telstra urged customers to try to call from a different phone.
Telstra said it would carry out a welfare check whenever it detected a failed Triple Zero call. “We’re working urgently to resolve this issue,” the statement said. By about 7am on Thursday, Telstra said about 90 per cent of Triple Zero calls that had been affected by the issue were now going through.
The fresh fault capped a chaotic day for the country’s biggest telco. A nationwide outage that began early on Wednesday morning caused more than 300 Triple Zero calls to fail, according to Telstra, with six people telling the company they needed help after the company and police carried out about 300 welfare checks.
One woman, identified only as Lynne, told the ABC that her 95-year-old mother collapsed at her home in the Hunter region of NSW and could not use her personal wearable alarm to get help because of the outage.
“She was pressing her… alarm to get help and without Telstra or without it piggybacking to another provider to carry that emergency through, it could have been life-and-death for her,” said Lynne, who ultimately found her mother distressed but unharmed. This masthead has not independently verified that account.
Two internal Telstra sources attributed the daytime outage to a software issue that sent the network’s timekeeping systems back almost 20 years, to 2006. Modern mobile networks rely on precise timing to authenticate devices, and the incorrect date caused parts of the network to reject customers’ phones.
Telstra’s chief financial officer, Michael Ackland, confirmed a software fault had changed the time across the network and said the company was working through the details. He apologised for letting customers down “in their hour of need” and said the daytime issues had been resolved by 4pm.
Ackland said more Triple Zero calls had failed than the company first expected, after some phones did not switch to Optus or TPG for emergency calls.
Liberal senator Kerrynne Liddle said her office had received a report of a death following an apparent failure to reach Triple Zero during the outage. South Australia Police said they were not aware of any death in the state as a result of the outage.
“The Senator’s office received a report this morning about the distress caused in relation to the outage,” a spokesperson said when asked for further details. “The family have been advised to contact SAPOL when they’re ready to talk about their experience.”
The earlier outage brought down Victoria’s entire regional passenger rail network, delayed some NSW trains, and hit payment terminals, electric-vehicle chargers and smaller carriers that use Telstra’s network, including Boost, Belong and Aldi Mobile.
Communications Minister Anika Wells said on Thursday morning that she should have been told of the initial outage earlier. Her office was informed around 7am, despite it beginning close to 3am.
“I would have liked to have heard earlier,” the Labor frontbencher, who yesterday returned early from leave, told the ABC’s radio program AM. ”It would seem there was some sort of delay.” She declined to call for immediate resignations at Telstra, saying that investigations should take their course.
Asked about Liddle’s claim of a death, Wells said: “I have not had it reported to me that any failure to connect to Triple Zero has contributed to an adverse outcome.”
Telstra’s chief executive, Vicki Brady, brought forward her return from leave overseas to Friday. Ackland is expected to address the media again on Thursday.
Telstra was fined more than $3 million in 2024 over an earlier outage that stopped some customers reaching Triple Zero. The telco is now facing potential penalties in the tens of millions of dollars for Wednesday’s issues.
Australia’s telcos have been under sustained scrutiny over reliability since two Optus failures. A nationwide Optus outage in November 2023 knocked out more than 10 million services and left about 2000 people unable to reach Triple Zero, and a separate Optus outage in September last year, in which hundreds could not reach the emergency line, was linked to two deaths and led to powers for a Triple Zero Custodian and tougher rules now being tested by Wednesday’s failures.
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David Swan is the technology editor for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. He was previously technology editor for The Australian newspaper.Connect via X or email.
