Telstra suffers second outage as police perform welfare checks over Triple Zero failures
Updated ,first published
Police are investigating a death that may be linked to the Telstra disaster that blocked more than 600 Triple Zero calls; The telecommunications company admits that the network failure was twice as bad as initially claimed and triggered a second major failure.
Officers said on Thursday afternoon they were investigating the death of a man at a regional hospital in South Australia on Wednesday after the family was referred to them through the office of Liberal senator Kerrynne Liddle, who had publicized concerns about the Triple Zero outage.
The admission that the outage halted twice as many emergency calls as first acknowledged by the nation’s largest telecommunications company came as federal data showed Thursday afternoon that there were 126 welfare checks that officials had yet to resolve.
Communications Minister Anika Wells visited Telstra and demanded “full transparency” about the outage after the company took hours to notify her office that the outage had begun.
“Telecommunications companies should take action as soon as they become aware of something they need to tell the public,” he said in a statement. “What Telstra knew, when it knew it and how it communicated it to stakeholders will be the subject of investigation.”
On Thursday afternoon, Telstra’s chief financial officer, Michael Ackland, who oversaw the crisis as the company’s boss Vicki Brady returned from holidays abroad, said the second outage was over.
He defended the time Telstra took to notify Wells, whose office was first notified of the outage at around 7am on Wednesday. Customer reports suggest the incident started around 3am, and Telstra said it was made aware of the situation around 4.30am.
“We will always contact our customers first when we see there is an issue, and there are certain thresholds when our obligations are to communicate with everyone,” Ackland said. “As soon as the incident reached that threshold, we notified the minister within minutes.”
Ackland told a press conference in Melbourne that 639 welfare checks had been carried out since the outage began, 170 cases had been forwarded to police and seven people had told the company they needed help.
A Telstra executive confirmed this imprint reported that a glitch that reset key timing systems to November 2006 caused parts of the network to reject customers’ phones showing the correct time. “There was a glitch in the software that reset the GPS timer,” he said. “It was a software bug that caused time to go back.”
Telstra has launched an internal analysis into the outages, while communications regulator ACMA has launched its own investigation on behalf of the government.
The second fault emerged on Wednesday night, hours after Telstra said its network was up and running at around 5.15pm. Ackland said the problem was caused by the same software bug as the first bug, but had to be fixed in a different way.
Disruption for passengers extended into a second day. Victoria’s entire regional train network remained suspended until peaking on Thursday morning, with some trains in the NSW Hunter and Southern Highlands also affected, but the country’s railways began to return to normal throughout the day.
A woman identified only as Lynne told the ABC on Thursday morning that her 95-year-old mother had collapsed at her home in NSW’s Hunter region and was unable to use her personal wearable alarm to get help due to the outage.
“She was pressing her alarm to get help and if it hadn’t been for Telstra or if she hadn’t turned to another provider to get through this emergency, it could have been a matter of life or death for her,” said Lynne, who eventually found her mother distressed but unharmed. This masthead has not independently verified the account in question.
Two internal Telstra sources had attributed the outage to a timekeeping error before Telstra confirmed it. Modern mobile networks rely on precise timing to authenticate devices, and the wrong date will cause parts of the network to reject customers’ phones. Ackland said a full root cause analysis would begin immediately and dismissed suggestions that the network was fragile, describing it as a “complex system” with built-in redundancy.
Questions have been raised about how quickly Telstra told the government. Earlier Thursday, Wells said on ABC: A.M. He said he “wanted to hear it sooner” and that the apparent delay would be part of the investigation, but he refused to call for an immediate resignation.
“The Triple Zero Officer has informed me that state and territory emergency authorities have not yet reported any adverse outcomes resulting from Telstra’s outage, with 44 of the 170 people referred returning a positive benefit check,” he said in a later statement.
Liddle said Wednesday that his office received a report of a death after Triple Zero could not be reached during the outage. South Australian Police initially said they were not aware of any deaths due to the outage.
On Thursday afternoon, police said they had contacted the family of a person who died at a regional hospital on Wednesday and had opened an investigation into the cause and circumstances of the death. They will prepare a report for the coroner. While police claimed Liddle’s office was initially uncooperative, Liddle said he wanted to leave it up to the grieving family to decide whether to notify authorities.
“I have prioritized the family’s privacy during this time,” Liddle said on social media. He declared Telstra’s outage was “completely unacceptable”.
Telstra was fined more than $3 million in 2024 over an earlier outage that prevented some customers from reaching Triple Zero. The telecommunications company currently faces potential fines worth tens of millions of dollars.
Australia’s telecommunications companies have been under constant scrutiny for reliability since the two Optus failures. A nationwide Optus outage in November 2023 left more than 10 million services disabled and nearly 2,000 people unable to reach Triple Zero. A separate Optus outage in September last year, which left hundreds of people unable to reach the emergency line, was linked to and led to two fatalities. Powers of the Triple Zero Officer and tougher rules are now being tested by 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.
