TEMPO.CO, Jakarta – Australia's largest telecommunications provider, Telstra, suffered a major nationwide outage on Wednesday, disrupting mobile and internet services for thousands of customers, suspending regional train services, and affecting emergency communications across the country.
According to the The Guardian, Telstra confirmed it was investigating an issue affecting mobile calls and data connections on its network, which serves about 25 million mobile services nationwide.
"We're looking into an issue affecting some mobile calls and data connections," the company said in a statement on social media.
"We're on it and will share an update as soon as it's fixed. Thanks for bearing with us."
The company advised affected customers to restart their devices as a possible temporary solution while engineers worked to restore services.
Reports of the outage began appearing on online monitoring platform Downdetector shortly after 4 a.m. local time, with complaints climbing into the tens of thousands as the disruption spread across Australia.
The outage forced the suspension of all regional train services in the state of Victoria after communication systems relying on the Telstra network failed.
V/Line, Victoria's regional rail operator, said services were unable to operate because of radio network issues linked to the outage, with no immediate estimate for when operations would resume. Around 70,000 passengers use the regional rail network each day.
As reported by SBS, the outage also disrupted rail services in New South Wales. Transport for NSW said trains were suspended between Campbelltown and Moss Vale-Goulburn on the Southern Highlands Line, as well as between Newcastle Interchange and Maitland, while replacement buses were being arranged.
Federal Emergency Management Minister Kristy McBain said Telstra was working to restore services and confirmed that Australian mobile phones were designed to switch to other available networks to maintain access to Triple Zero emergency calls.
Western Australia Police also warned that the outage had affected some calls to emergency services and urged residents to check on vulnerable family members while the disruption continued.
No official figure has been released for the total number of affected customers, and Telstra had not identified the cause of the outage as of Wednesday morning.
The disruption prompted widespread frustration on social media, with users reporting that some devices remained connected while others lost service entirely. Several businesses also said the outage had interrupted their operations.
The incident follows a series of major telecommunications disruptions in Australia over the past two years. Vodafone experienced intermittent mobile and data issues nationwide in June, while a nearly 14-hour outage at Optus in September 2025 was later linked to two deaths after emergency communications were disrupted.
Telstra itself experienced a major system failure in March 2024 that affected emergency service calls. The company was later fined A$3 million after an investigation found failures in handling emergency communications.
Following those incidents, Australia's communications regulator introduced new rules requiring telecommunications providers to publicly disclose when outages begin and end, along with their causes, in an effort to improve transparency and customer communication during major service disruptions.
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