00:02I'm here at Southern Cross train station.
00:04It is a major transport hub in the heart of Melbourne.
00:07And where people come to get out to the regions on trains.
00:10But all morning people have been rocking up at the platforms behind me and being told no trains are running
00:16to the regional areas
00:17because these V-line services have been suspended as a result of the nationwide outage.
00:24And the officers, the customer service officers from V-line have been reminding us all morning
00:28that this disruption is because of the Telstra outage.
00:32I spoke to some of the people waiting.
00:33Some said they've been waiting well over an hour.
00:36Feeling very frustrated at what has happened.
00:39Some people unable to get to work.
00:41Other people trying to get to university on the first day of semester.
00:45There was one family just trying to get out to the Ballarat Winter Festival.
00:49And so they've had to change their plans.
00:51Here's what some of them had to say when I spoke to them.
00:53I can't go to Thaniard.
00:55So my job has been cancelled today.
00:58And with the phone connections as well, it's like sore disruptions going on.
01:03Yeah, obviously not ideal.
01:04But I was heading out to Ballarat this morning.
01:06So I've got to find a new way of getting out there.
01:09So we'll see what happens.
01:11I was waiting to meet some people who were coming up from down south of Geelong.
01:14And the trains were stopped.
01:15So I had to cancel that.
01:17And we're heading off somewhere else now.
01:20So people have been taking it pretty well.
01:21There have been replacement buses organized for some services, but those are quite limited.
01:25So some people have had to just cancel plans altogether or, you know, put off their travel for a little
01:30while.
01:31So it's quite a bit of chaos from this.
01:33And just a little example of some of the disruption caused by this outage.
01:37I mean, even me and my team, when we left the ABC office this morning, the three of us were
01:42shocked in the car on the way to location to find all of our phones were on SOS.
01:47And so I had to run out of the car.
01:49We found a Telstra phone box, unable to get through to anyone there.
01:53Then I ran into a petrol station and begged the worker there to let me use his phone.
01:57And he initially didn't trust me, so he wanted to see my ID, which is fair.
02:03I got my VicRoads app up.
02:05But then, I don't know if you can see that connection error.
02:08And it was an SOS.
02:09So I said I had no idea.
02:11But luckily he let me use his phone and I was able to get through to work.
02:15But, you know, this is just one example of many little disruptions that people felt this morning.
02:20And I talked to a couple of people who were saying, you know, maybe this is a good reminder to
02:23have some cash on you and not be so reliant on these little devices.
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