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

SYDNEY – Australia’s biggest telecoms firm Telstra said on July 8 it was urgently investigating the cause of a nationwide outage that cut phone services for thousands of customers, disrupted wireless payments and halted trains.

A fault involving specialised servers that manage time synchronisation at Telstra’s data centres in Sydney and Melbourne may have caused the outage, chief financial officer Michael Ackland said. He added that there was no evidence of a cyberattack.

“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.

The outage, which began in the early hours of July 8, lasted roughly five hours. About 90 per cent of services have been restored.

Telstra shares fell as much as 3.8 per cent on July 8, but later pared losses to trade 2.5 per cent lower in the afternoon.

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,” he 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 400km 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,” he said.

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

Telstra also said it was investigating reports of failed calls to Australia’s primary emergency number during the outage and was conducting welfare checks on customers who could not connect to the emergency number.

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

The country’s second-biggest telecoms firm Optus, owned by Singtel, in 2025 suffered a highly damaging 13-hour disruption to emergency call services, which led to three 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.

In 2025, the Australian government increased penalties for telecoms companies that fail to ensure emergency calls connect to A$30 million (S$26 million). REUTERS