The first signs something was wrong with the country’s largest mobile network began just after 4am, as people rolled out of bed to begin their day only to find they couldn’t make or receive phone calls or access mobile internet.
“No Telstra mobile service for past half hour,” one person from Victoria’s Point Cook wrote on Down Detector, which had reports slowly trickle in from 4am and then ratchet up to 7,000 in the hour from 5.30am.
“No mobile service,” someone else wrote from Sydney’s inner west.
“Can’t call 000,” one person wrote.
Telstra, which powers about 25m mobile services nationwide, plunged into a nationwide outage for most of Wednesday morning, an event the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, labelled “deeply concerning” and “disruptive”.
Over the course of the approximately six-hour outage, it became apparent just how much Australians rely on Telstra.
Some Eftpos machines couldn’t process payments, leaving customers in the lurch.
“Currently at Hungry Jacks Wollongong to figure out what the heck is going on. When is this gonna be normal?” one posted on Down Detector.
Sign up for the Breaking News Australia emailOne person in Adelaide told Guardian Australia she runs a business online and had no interactions on her website while the network was down.
“This is very frustrating. Truly at the mercy of the cyber world hey?” she said.
Fears turned to whether there could be a repeat of the 2025 Optus outage, in which 600 households in South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory faced at least a 10-hour outage. Three people died during the botched upgrade, including an eight-week-old baby.
Some state police services confirmed that triple-zero calls, which operate on a different network, hadn’t been affected in the outage, but others warned Telstra customers could experience issues.
On Wednesday evening, Telstra’s chief financial officer, Michael Ackland, said the telco had conducted 333 welfare calls in response to calls to triple zero that failed in some way to connect.
Of those, six people said they still needed assistance and were connected with emergency services, while police conducted physical welfare checks on 79 people Telstra was unable to reach.
Just as train networks were about to hit peak hour on Wednesday morning, the regional train network in Victoria ground to a halt. Two regional train lines in New South Wales also went down.
“Services are currently unable to operate due to the national Telstra outage affecting the network,” Victoria’s V/Line confirmed.
“There is no estimated time for rectification at this stage. Passengers are advised to defer travel where possible.”
It was an ironic turn for 62-year-old Luke, who had planned to travel on the V/Line on Wednesday morning from Castlemaine to Bendigo for an appointment with Telstra unrelated to the outage, and was unable to travel to the appointment because of its network failure.
“I don’t drive, and a taxi is not financially viable,” he said.
It wasn’t only the trains. Adnan Choudhury’s wife and children were returning from visiting family in Gladstone on Wednesday morning to Brisbane in his electric car when his wife realised she couldn’t access maps.
When she attempted to charge the car at the EV station in Bundaberg, she couldn’t use the app on her phone to make payments in the EV charger station, and the station itself was not online.
Choudhury said some stations automatically provide free charging in such a scenario but neither of the two stations his wife visited were working while the outage was ongoing.
“She basically had to wait at a McDonald’s until the network was restored, at which point she could finally charge,” he said.
Choudhury said he remains a supporter of EVs, and lays blame for the problem directly with Telstra.
“I don’t carry cash. If I got to a petrol station and their Eftpos services weren’t working, I would be just as screwed because I couldn’t pay for petrol,” he said.
“It’s not my car’s fault that Telstra can’t do its job.”
‘Deeply sorry’
Ackland, who has been Telstra’s acting chief executive while Vicki Brady is on leave, held a press conference at 10am, by which point 90% of services had been restored. At another press conference just after 5pm, he said that was now 100%.
“We are still conducting our investigation into the root cause, but we are confident we have identified a software defect,” he said.
“We are deeply sorry for the impact that this has had today on so many people.”
At his 10am press conference, Ackland warned customers not to test and “try out triple zero unless you need to”.
In the afternoon, the shadow communications minister, Sarah Henderson, told ABC’s Afternoon Briefing she had called triple-zero as a test – an act which is against the law.
She defended the action and said it wasn’t against the law, arguing “the bottom line is that I’m doing my job, and I don’t have trust in this government”.
The communications minister, Anika Wells, cut a holiday short to respond to the outage. She said it was the responsibility of the telcos to improve their systems to “make sure that Australians can rely upon them when they need them most”.
“There are some improvements to the system. This is different [in] nature [to] the Optus outage in September,” she said.
Wells also snapped at claims made by One Nation’s Barnaby Joyce, who suggested foreign interference could be a factor in the Telstra outage, calling it “irresponsible”.
Ackland, who confirmed the outage was not caused by a “cyber incident”, said others had also found an opportunity to exploit the chaos.
“We have seen reports of customers receiving calls from fraudsters trying to take advantage of this moment, and our advice to our customers is, if you get a call from someone claiming to be Telstra asking you for details in light of today’s outage, please hang up and call us back directly now,” he said.
Fallout continues
For some, the chaos is still not over.
While public transport in WA and SA was unaffected, passengers taking regional trains in Victoria and New South Wales were not as lucky.
In NSW, regional rail passengers were warned to prepare for continued disruptions to services on Thursday morning, with metro services unaffected.
The state’s transport department on Wednesday evening said passengers on regional Sydney Trains and NSW TrainLink regional rail services should “expect flow-on impacts” and to “plan ahead and check the latest service information before commencing their journey due to ongoing disruptions affecting rail operations” .
Victoria’s V/line train services were disrupted throughout Wednesday with the regional trainline warning they would also affect Thursday morning’s peak services.
Meg Wilson was one of hundreds queuing for a replacement bus to Ballarat on Wednesday evening. She lives in Mount Gambier, about five hours from Melbourne.
She had been in the queue for about 30 minutes when an announcement advised passengers to “make their own way home” as there would be a “two- to three-hour delay” in more coaches.
“That’s impossible – it is not going to happen,” she told Guardian Australia. “I have no family anywhere closer to come and get me. There are no rental car places that are open; there’s no other way.”
Wilson had caught a coach from Ballarat early on Wednesday into Melbourne.
“They expected in Ballarat that [the outage issue] was going to be cleared up this afternoon. I should have stayed home.”
In a statement on Wednesday evening, a V/Line spokesperson advised passengers “not to travel on V/Line services [on Thursday] if possible”.
“The V/Line network continues to be impacted following the nationwide Telstra telecommunications outage, with passenger train services unable to operate,” the spokesperson said.
A “very limited coach service” would operate during Thursday morning’s peak hours, they said, thanking passengers “for their patience as work continues to safely restore services”.
