Thousands of Telstra customers across New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland are struggling to get a signal, with Down Detector showing that the outage kicked in at 4.30am this morning, according to Telstra.

As of 10:00am AEST, Telstra was claiming that 90% of its network had been restored, but it still does not know what the cause of the problem was that saw key nodes around the country fail.

Some observers are questioning whether it was an attack by Chinese hackers. Millions of customers are believed to have been affected.

One Nation MP Barnaby Joyce has called for the outage to be investigated to ensure there was no link to China’s ballistic missile launch in the Pacific earlier this week, though no evidence has been presented to suggest foreign interference.

It appears that time synchronisation across their nodes failed. Telstra CFO Michael Ackland acknowledged that the problem was national.

Questions are being raised as to why Telstra put Ackland, the chief financial officer of the company, up as their spokesperson, as opposed to their chief information officer.

Ackland claimed that it could be some time before the network is fully restored.

Also down is Boost and Belong, along with other providers that host off the Telstra wholesale network. The Woolworths network was also affected.

Aldi Mobile, which also operates on the Telstra network, was also reported to have been affected.

The national network was down during peak-hour early morning commutes, with those trying to dial numbers getting a combination of error messages.

The good news is that emergency calls to Triple Zero were still expected to work, with phones displaying “SOS only” able to automatically connect through another available mobile network if required.

However, NSW Police and WA Police have warned that while Triple Zero systems themselves were not affected, some Telstra customers may not be able to reach Triple Zero from affected Telstra devices. Customers unable to get through have been advised to try another device, a landline or Wi-Fi calling.

Telstra staff working on the problem are also affected, according to sources.

Telstra has acknowledged the widespread service disruption, which is also affecting data servers.

Management claim that they are investigating the issue and have advised customers to try resetting their devices while emergency calls remain operational.

Some reports of the outage began emerging about 3am on Wednesday, with outage monitoring website Down Detector recording thousands of complaints as customers across NSW, Victoria, Queensland, Tasmania and the Northern Territory experienced disruptions.

Many users reported their phones displaying “SOS only”, while others said they were unable to make calls or use mobile data.

The outage also caused major disruption to public transport, with Victoria’s entire V/Line regional train network halted.

Transport for NSW also warned of significant delays on regional and intercity services, including routes between Sydney and Brisbane, Armidale, Casino and Grafton, as well as services on the Hunter and Southern Highlands lines. Replacement buses were being organised for some affected services.

EFTPOS provider Tyro also confirmed that some of its customers were unable to process transactions over 4G, affecting businesses that rely on mobile network connections for payments.

Victoria Police said it was aware of a telecommunications outage affecting a number of its mobile and landline services, but said there was no evidence of any impact to frontline service delivery. Triple Zero Victoria said it remained fully operational and continued to dispatch calls.

CFA Victoria said its primary paging and radio network remained fully operational, although some administrative platforms requiring SMS confirmation and redundancy links had been affected.

“If you’re having trouble connecting, try again as it may work on a retry. We’re on it and will share an update as soon as it’s fixed. Thanks for bearing with us.”

Consumer advocates are now calling for Telstra to provide a full explanation of what happened, who was affected and when all services will be fully restored.