Telstra hit by fresh Triple Zero fault hours after outage fixed
Telstra was urgently investigating a second network failure on Wednesday night that prevented some calls from connecting, including on Triple Zero; hours after the telco said it had resolved the outage that disrupted mobile services for much of the day.
In a statement published at around 9.30pm (AEST) on Wednesday, Telstra said it had fixed the fault behind the daytime outage but had identified a “secondary issue” affecting some calls, including Triple Zero.
Eamon Gallagher
People calling Triple Zero may hear an error message when their phone tries to connect to another mobile network, the company said. Anyone who could not reach them was urged to wait up to 90 seconds for their phone to change network. If this fails, Telstra has urged customers to try calling from a different phone.
Telstra said it would conduct a welfare check whenever it detected a failed Triple Zero call. “We are working urgently to resolve this issue,” the statement said.
The new glitch capped a chaotic day for the country’s largest telecommunications company. According to Telstra, a nationwide outage that began in the early hours of Wednesday morning caused more than 300 Triple Zero calls to fail; After the company and police conducted nearly 300 welfare checks, six people told the company they needed help.
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 wrong date has caused parts of the network to reject customers’ phones.
Telstra’s chief financial officer, Michael Ackland, confirmed that a software bug had changed the time on the network and said the company was working on the details. He apologized for disappointing customers “in their time of need” and said daytime issues were resolved by 4pm.
Ackland said more Triple Zero calls failed than the company first expected after some phones failed to switch to Optus or TPG for emergency calls.
Liberal senator Kerrynne Liddle said her office had received a report of a death after Triple Zero could not be reached during the outage. South Australia Police said they were not aware of any deaths in the state as a result of the outage.
“The Senator’s office received a report this morning regarding distress related to the outage,” a spokesperson said when asked for more details. “The family were advised to contact SAPOL when they were ready to talk about their experience.”
The earlier outage brought down Victoria’s entire regional passenger rail network, causing delays on some NSW trains and affecting payment terminals, electric vehicle chargers and smaller carriers using Telstra’s network, including Boost, Belong and Aldi Mobile.
Communications Minister Anika Wells, who cut short her leave to deal with the crisis, said “there’s a reason the telecommunications industry is the least trusted industry in Australia, these are the days.” Telstra chief executive Vicki Brady has postponed her return from overseas leave until Friday.
Telstra was fined more than $3 million in 2024 over an earlier outage that prevented some customers from reaching Triple Zero. The telecommunications company is currently facing potential penalties of tens of millions of dollars over Wednesday’s problems.
Australia’s telecommunications companies have been under constant scrutiny for reliability since the two Optus failures. A nationwide Optus outage in November 2023 disabled more than 10 million services and left nearly 2,000 people unable to reach Triple Zero. A separate Optus outage in September last year, in which hundreds of people were unable to reach the emergency line, was linked to two deaths and led to the authorization of Triple Zero Custodian and the testing of tighter rules in Wednesday’s failures.
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David Swan is the technology editor of The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. He was previously technology editor of The Australian newspaper.Connect with: X or email.
