Retailers have been left unable to process card payments, freight trains have been halted and some Triple Zero calls have failed after a major outage crippled Telstra’s national mobile network today, with both the telco’s leadership and the Federal Communications Minister forced back from mid year breaks to address the crisis.

Several retailers believe that Telstra should pay compensation to retailers for lost business.

Communications Minister Anika Wells said Telstra would need to explain how and why its network crashed, describing telcos such as Telstra as the least trusted industry in Australia.

A broken timer at two Telstra data centres, in Sydney and Melbourne, triggered the nationwide outage across the mobile and data network at Australia’s largest telco, bringing trains to a halt and prompting urgent welfare checks after some Triple Zero calls failed.

Telstra’s chief financial officer and acting chief executive, Michael Ackland, instead of the Companies Chief Information Officer fronted a press conference today where he said the $56 billion company had no idea what caused the timing issue that started affecting several nodes on Australia’s east coast at about 4.30am.

Communications Minister Anika Wells is holding a press conference after this morning’s Telstra outage.

“The time synchronisation in those nodes wasn’t working as it should. We don’t know why yet,” said Ackland.

Millions of customers of Australia’s biggest telco woke to mobile and data outages, with the carrier, which powers about 25 million mobile services nationwide, blaming an issue with a time keeping server for the failure.

Telstra chief financial officer Michael Ackland, who is acting chief executive while Vicki Brady is on annual leave, said the outage began at 4.30am AEST and was an intermittent issue affecting calls and data services.

He said there was no indication the failure was the result of malicious activity, but admitted the company did not know exactly what caused it.

“The issue is impacting a number of nodes within our network that keep time across the mobile network,” Ackland told reporters.

By 10am AEST Telstra said 90 per cent of calls and data services had been restored, but conceded it had not yet identified the root cause. DownDetector reports began at 4.15am and spiked at 6.30am, with complaints flooding in from every state and territory.

Ackland claimed as many as tens of thousands of people could be impacted, suggesting the number was likely lower, however online reports indicate the outage could be significantly larger than Telstra has described.

Triple Zero Failures And Political Fallout

The implications were widespread, affecting Triple Zero calls, regional train services and payment systems.

State police services reported that while Triple Zero call centres were unaffected, some Telstra customers attempting to reach them could not connect. The telco said it was conducting welfare checks on customers it was aware of who could not make emergency calls.

“The Triple Zero custodian has advised that some callers were unable to connect to the ECP [emergency call person], and that these are being now investigated by Telstra, and welfare checks are in progress, as is required by the law,” Wells told reporters in Canberra.

Communications Minister Anika Wells

Wells said the Triple Zero custodian was keeping a detailed account of who knew what and when. “One of the improvements we wanted out of the Optus outage in September was to get a much better handle on that,” she said.

The outage has also triggered a political brawl, with Emergency Management Minister Kristy McBain attacking opposition communications spokeswoman Sarah Henderson for calling Triple Zero during the outage, despite Henderson arguing she had an obligation to test whether Telstra and the Federal Labor Government were telling the truth about the status of the 000 network.

“Our emergency services do a fantastic job responding to emergency calls when they are made,” McBain said at a Canberra press conference. “The last thing we need is anyone making test calls to Triple Zero.”

“We teach our kids not to prank call Triple Zero, and I think it is absolutely outrageous that the shadow communications minister has been making test calls to Triple Zero at a time where we need to make sure that we are doing as many welfare checks as possible.”

Henderson told Sky News she had called Triple Zero to check if it was working.

Freight Network Halted

National freight networks were brought to a standstill by the outage, with McBain, who is also acting Transport Minister, confirming the Australian Rail Track Corporation had paused freight train operations because emergency communications on the national freight network were down.

Telstra CEO Vicki Brady

“I’ve asked the National Emergency Management Agency to convene another National Coordination Mechanism meeting this afternoon,” McBain said. “The NCM will include relevant Australian government agencies, state and territory agencies, and Telstra, so there is a shared situational awareness and a co-ordinated response.”

Retailers Hit In The Hip Pocket

The most direct commercial damage was through EFTPOS, with payment provider Tyro confirming some customers were unable to connect their EFTPOS machines to the 4G network to process transactions, attributing the issue to a national telephone network provider.

Tyro is used by tens of thousands of Australian businesses, and affected merchants were forced to switch to Wi-Fi, ethernet or cash only payments where possible. For cafes, retailers, taxis, service stations and small businesses, even a few hours of disrupted EFTPOS access can mean lost sales, longer queues and frustrated customers, with retailers taking to social media reporting they were unable to process card payments.

The impact went well beyond Telstra’s own customer base, with users of providers riding on the Telstra network, including Boost Mobile, Belong, Aldi Mobile, Everyday Mobile and Tangerine, also reporting disruptions. That left small traders using cheaper providers for terminal connectivity or business phones equally exposed.

Asked about compensation, Ackland said Telstra’s priority was restoring services first, adding the company would work with all customers once services were restored as part of its normal process. Angry customers on social media said their businesses had been affected and demanded compensation.

The compensation question has form. Telstra was fined more than $3 million over a 2024 outage that disrupted emergency call services, while during the infamous 2019 payments outage the National Retailers Association estimated lost retail sales could have hit $100 million for the day. A2B, the owner of Cabcharge, said an earlier two day machine to machine outage cost it $5 million in unprocessable taxi fares.

Regulators Under Pressure To Act

Consumer advocates are already turning the failure into an accountability story.

Australian Communications Consumer Action Network chief executive Carol Bennett said every telco outage carries a cost to public safety, business operations, social connection and the economy at large, calling it the latest in a string of reliability failures and questioning how long it will be before telcos face enforceable reliability requirements rather than voluntary commitments.

This year the Australian Communications and Media Authority moved to scrap the industry’s self written consumer code and replace it with enforceable rules. Since June 30, telcos have been required to publish usability based coverage maps and public registers of outages, a change that prompted Telstra to shrink its own coverage claims.

But significant gaps remain. Only Triple Zero calls are required to fall back to another carrier when a network goes down, and on Wednesday even that appeared to falter. Australia still has no enforceable reliability standard and no minimum uptime requirement of the kind that governs power and water, with networks running on voluntary commitments.