Telstra sorry for outage, admits it doesn't know cause

Telstra has admitted it still does not know what caused a major outage impacting 3G and 4G networks today.

Police warned the outage may have prevented people from calling Triple-0 and a number of customers were frustrated they only had SOS coverage.

Despite the police warning, Telstra said calls to Triple-0 would connect over other carriers’ networks where they have mobile coverage.

Telstra was working to resolve the issue impacting 4G mobile voice and data services across the country, which then caused congestion for 3G services.

A large number of customers in Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide and Perth were affected and the ABC reports Commonwealth Bank and NAB customers were having trouble with EFTPOS facilities.

Telstra’s group managing director of networks Mike Wright told the ABC the cause of the outage was unknown, but it was not related to a widespread outage 20 days ago, which impacted customers for two hours.

“Today at around 10am a fault in the core of our network caused some problems with connectivity to the 4G layer of our network,” he said.

“That meant all our customers on our networks were connecting to the 3G layer, and of course with that big shift in traffic, that had some interruptions in the amount of data the network could carry and also caused some calls to fail and some customers to intermittently lose service.

“From around midday we began to isolate some elements that were problematic in the network … we’re still finding the source of the problem itself, [but] we know what the effect was and were able to isolate some elements to restore service.”

Telstra issued a statement just before 3pm AEST saying mobile voice and data services had returned to normal levels.

“We will closely monitor network stability and performance and continue supporting customers to restore their services. We are again deeply sorry for any disruption as we know how customers rely on our mobile services.”

A spokesperson for Communications Minister Mitch Fifield told the ABC the secretary of the Department of Communications was seeking information about what caused the outage.

Customers slammed the communications giant on Twitter, with some claiming it had been happening for months.

“Dear Telstra, I pay my bills on time, can you please start to hold up your end of the bargain,” customer Dion Costigan wrote on Twitter.

“Getting a little tired of this happening and has been for months.”