00:02A day of chaos as Telstra goes down.
00:05It was just SOS mode, couldn't make any calls, couldn't access any internet.
00:09I couldn't get my texts, I couldn't play my music.
00:13With the top boss on leave, the Telco's chief financial officer was left to front journalists.
00:19We don't yet know the root cause.
00:21Telstra says it learnt about service issues early on Wednesday.
00:25By sunrise, there were reports of outages on calls and texts nationally.
00:30In Victoria, regional commuters were forced onto buses, with V-line blaming Telstra.
00:35Everyone was just very cold and not sure what to do now.
00:39But South Australian commuters had better luck.
00:42SA Metro train lines aren't on Telstra, so they dodged the outage.
00:46There hasn't been an impact on public transport except for a couple of the real-time locations for our buses
00:52and trains.
00:52But national trains were brought to a halt, with passengers on the GAN boarding in Adelaide and left stuck on
00:58the platform for hours.
01:00Other people are having lunch at the moment, so lunch is being served.
01:03Some businesses lost FPOS, with payment platform Tiro confirming problems.
01:08In SA, traffic lights lost connection, meaning they switched to default sequences.
01:13As the day progressed, services resumed for most customers.
01:17But more details emerged about the gravest concern.
01:20The triple zero custodian has advised that some callers were unable to connect.
01:26Late today, Telstra's CFO again faced the press, admitting the triple zero outage was far worse than previously confirmed,
01:33with at least 300 calls not going through.
01:37There is absolutely no doubt we have created a level of anxiety with customers in their hour of need today
01:42that is not acceptable.
01:43SA police says while some triple zero calls may have been affected, so far, Telstra hasn't passed on any welfare
01:50check requests locally.
01:52It is affecting some SAPOL systems, but it's not adversely impacting on our ability to respond to grade one, grade
01:58two taskings.
01:58Today's outage comes less than a year after the deadly triple zero failure from Telstra's biggest rival, Optus.
02:06Again, Australians are being forced to ask whether they can rely on the country's biggest telcos during emergencies.
02:13This is deeply concerning and it's very disruptive to people's lives throughout the country.
02:19Telstra has blamed the outage on issues with timekeeping nodes at data centres in Melbourne and Sydney.
02:24The government says it's up to Telstra to conduct a full investigation.
02:28And the company might have to pay out impacted customers.
02:32Another outage that will force more calls for change.
Comments