Telstra outage in Australia disrupts trains and payments; no evidence of ‘malicious’ activity

By Renju Jose and Nikita Maria Jino

SYDNEY, July 8 (Reuters) – Australia’s biggest telecoms company Telstra said on Wednesday a software fault triggered a nationwide outage that cut phone services for thousands of customers, disrupted wireless payments and halted trains.

The defect affected specialised servers that manage time synchronisation at Telstra’s data centres in Sydney and Melbourne, Chief Financial Officer Michael Ackland said, adding the mass outage was not caused by a cyber attack.

“We are still conducting our investigation into the root cause, but we are confident we have identified a software defect. We’ve been able to isolate it,” Ackland told reporters in Melbourne.

The impact of the network crash, while intermittent, was more widespread than initially thought, he said.

More than 300 welfare checks were conducted for customers who called but were unable to connect to Australia’s primary emergency number. Six customers were referred to emergency services.

“We let customers down today in their hour of need. There’s nothing that makes that untrue for many of those customers who are in traumatic situations, and we apologise for that deeply,” Ackland said.

Telstra shares fell as much as 3.8% and closed 2.96% lower.

TAXI DRIVERS, CAFES AFFECTED

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said his government would work closely with Telstra as it investigated the outage.

“This is deeply concerning. It is very disruptive to people’s lives throughout the country. This is a national outage that has had varied effects,” Albanese told reporters.

Train services connecting Melbourne, Australia’s second-largest city, to regional towns were suspended due to communication issues and the operator advised passengers to defer travel where possible. Some trains on the New South Wales state rural lines were also disrupted.

As payment platforms went down, taxi drivers lost work and some customers found themselves unable to pay for their rides.

Mark Whitbread, a cafe owner in the rural town of Bega around 400 km (250 miles) south of Sydney, told ABC Radio he lost sales as he relies on a self-service point-of-sale system.

“We are in the world of satellites and it just shouldn’t happen,” Whitbread said.

The Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman urged small businesses to keep detailed records of the outage’s effect and any losses incurred.

The outage is the latest incident to hit Australia’s telecommunications sector, which only has three mobile network operators, and raises questions about the resilience of critical infrastructure.

The country’s second-biggest telecoms firm Optus, owned by Singapore Telecommunications, last year suffered a highly damaging 13-hour disruption to emergency call services, which possibly caused four deaths.

That came after a 2022 cyberattack that exposed millions of people’s personal details, and a 2023 outage that left millions of Australians without phone or internet for a day.

“Telcos are the least trusted industry in our country as we stand today and days like today demonstrate exactly why Australians feel that way. It will be up to Telstra to make things right,” said Communications Minister Anika Wells.

The government last year increased penalties for telecoms companies that fail to ensure emergency calls connect to A$30 million ($21 million).

($1 = 1.4413 Australian dollars)

(Reporting by Renju Jose and Christine Chen in Sydney and Nikita Maria Jino in Bengaluru. Editing by Sonali Paul, Edwina Gibbs and Mark POtter)