MELBOURNE, July 8 (Xinhua) -- Australians across the country have been impacted by a major outage that hit the nation's largest mobile network on Wednesday morning, causing disruptions to train services, payment platforms and data connections.
Telstra, Australia's largest telecommunications company, said in a statement on Wednesday morning that it was looking into an issue affecting some mobile calls and data connections and would share an update when the problem is resolved.
Telstra provides 24.9 million mobile services as of 2025.
Speaking to reporters in Melbourne, Telstra Chief Financial Officer Michael Ackland said that an issue affecting nodes that keep time across the mobile network was identified around 4:30 a.m. Australian Eastern Standard Time on Wednesday.
"When these nodes are not operating as expected, which is what has occurred, other parts of the network can be affected, resulting in intermittent issues with some mobile calls and data sessions," he said.
"We don't yet know the root cause. We are investigating that urgently."
The outage has caused widespread disruption to rail networks and payment platforms that utilize the Telstra network.
All regional rail services in the southeastern state of Victoria, where Telstra has its head office, were suspended on Wednesday morning, while some services in neighboring New South Wales (NSW) were also affected.
The operator of the services in Victoria, VLine, said in a notice posted on its website that there was no estimated time for rectification.
The Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) also said that some weather observations were not available due to an "external vendor fault" and the Commonwealth Bank, Australia's largest bank, said that some of its payment terminals may be unable to connect to the Telstra network.
Emergency services in NSW and Western Australia (WA) said that the outage has affected some calls to the national emergency telephone number, Triple Zero.
"Triple Zero systems are not affected, but you may not be able to reach Triple Zero if you are calling from a Telstra device," the NSW Police Force said, recommending that Telstra customers use another device.
Telstra was in 2024 fined three million Australian dollars (2.1 million U.S. dollars) for failing to comply with emergency call rules during a network outage. ■
