Telstra mobile outage plunges thousands into chaos

Thousands of Telstra customers were unable to make calls or access their data from their mobile phones on the country’s largest network.

The telecommunications provider, which powers nearly 25 million mobile services across the country, confirmed the outage on Wednesday.

“We are investigating an issue affecting some mobile calls and data connections” on X, Telstra said.

“We are working on this issue and will provide an update as soon as the issue is resolved. Thank you for bearing with us.”

Telstra asked users to reboot their devices as a workaround.

More than 7,500 customers reported the network outage on online monitoring platform Downdetector.

The latest outage comes after fellow telecoms giants Vodafone and Optus recently suffered blunders that proved fatal.

In June, Vodafone customers faced intermittent reception and data issues across Australia.

Customers who cannot access the network can use emergency triple zero by connecting to other available mobile networks, the telco said.

The two deaths were linked to an outage at Optus in September 2025 that lasted almost 14 hours and affected hundreds of calls across four states and territories.

New rules were adopted by the Australian Communications and Media Authority in March requiring telecommunications companies to publish details of when the outage started, when it was repaired and the cause.