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Wed, 08 Jul 2026

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 Trains and emergency calls affected after major outage at Australia's largest telecoms company

Servers at data centres in Sydney and Melbourne were to blame but the exact cause remains unknown.
Telstra, Australia's largest telecommunications company, experienced an outage on Wednesday that affected customers across the country. The outage, which lasted around 12 hours, was caused by a software defect related to time-keeping servers at data centres in Sydney and Melbourne. According to Telstra's chief financial officer Michael Ackland, the issue did not involve a cyber attack. Ackland apologized for the inconvenience caused by the outage, which resulted in cancelled train services, disrupted regional services in New South Wales and Victoria, and affected around 80,000 businesses that use the Tyro payment system. The outage also led to concerns about emergency call services, with six customers requiring immediate help after being unable to make calls. The Australian government has launched an investigation into the outage, which was described as "deeply concerning" by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. Telstra's Ackland acknowledged that the impact of the outage had been "national", but assured that the company takes such incidents seriously and invests heavily in resilience and cybersecurity measures to prevent them. Communications Minister Anika Wells announced that the Australian Communication and Media Authority will investigate the cause of the outage, with a view to preventing similar incidents in the future.