Telstra outage LIVE: Users report mass network disruption across Australia

Telstra CFO Michael Ackland has spoken in Melbourne about the nationwide Telstra network outage.

“Some mobile calls and data services [are impacted by this outage]. So the issue is impacting a number of nodes within our network that keep time across the mobile network. 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.

“We’ve been able now to restore some of these nodes, but that will take time for that to reset across all the thousands of servers across the network. We believe that just under 90% of calls and data services at this point are now working correctly.

“So customers who are having trouble making a call, we encourage you to try again and, depending on how the call is routed through the network, it may connect successfully on another attempt.”

He then moved on to emergency calls being impacted by the mass outage.

“Triple Zero calls follow a different setting in our network, and therefore they were not impacted in the same way,” Ackland said.

“We conduct welfare checks when any call to triple zero fails, and we do ask customers not to test and try out triple zero unless you need to unless you need it. The Telstra CFO said that the Telco does not yet know the root cause of the outage, but are investigating urgently.

“We’ll provide updates as soon as we get more information about the root cause. We know that customers across the whole community rely on our connectivity. This network challenge has caused many issues, and it’s been a big disruption to many people’s days, and we apologise for that. Our teams are working right now, as quickly as possible, to get things back online, and we will share updates with you as we have them.”

Ackland added that “at this stage we have nothing to indicate malicious activity” as being the reason behind the mass Telstra outage.