Telstra outage: Trains and emergency calls in Australia affected by telecom outage.

A major outage at Australia’s biggest telecommunications company has disrupted train services, knocked out mobile coverage for thousands of customers and prompted an investigation into missed emergency calls.

Telstra chief financial officer Michael Ackland apologized for the disruption to “some mobile calls and data services” which started at 8.30am on Wednesday.

He said service was fully restored 12 hours later. A software flaw linked to timing servers at data centers in Sydney and Melbourne was to blame – not a cyber attack, Ackland added.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the disaster was “very serious”.

Telstra described the outage as “non-disruptive” but admitted the impact was “nationwide”.

Ackland said the telecom company conducted welfare checks on customers who called emergency services during the outage, saying six needed immediate assistance.

He adds that backup systems that route emergency calls through other mobile carriers work largely the same way.

Asked if the country could still rely on the big mobile network, Ackland said: “Australia can rely on its big telco…we take these exits very seriously.”

“Our investments in resiliency and cyber security are high in redundancy across the network, but it’s a large and complex network and problems do happen from time to time.”

For about three dozen calls to the emergency services, they confirmed that a welfare check was being carried out, but they did not pass it, but that “the main triple zero system is still in place”.

Communications Minister Annika Wells said the country’s telecoms regulator, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, would investigate the outage.

In Victoria, all regional train services were canceled due to the outage, and some regional services in New South Wales were also disrupted. National freight services are also affected.

The payment systems of nearly 80,000 businesses using the affected Tyro app were also down.

Last September, Systems outage at Optus Australia’s second largest telecoms company – hundreds of thousands of people across the country – were unable to call emergency services for 13 hours, leading to three deaths.

Optus also after the penalty Termination in 2023 Thousands were unable to call emergency services.