Australian telecommunications giant Telstra said on Thursday that it is working to resolve an issue affecting calls to emergency services following a major network outage that caused widespread disruptions on Wednesday.
Telstra said in a statement that teams had made “good progress” overnight to reduce the occurrence of a secondary issue impacting some calls to the national emergency number, Triple Zero, and would continue to work to eliminate the problem.
It comes after Telstra’s network, the largest in Australia, was hit by a major nationwide outage on Wednesday that caused disruptions to train services, payment platforms and Triple Zero calls.
The company said that the outage was caused by malfunctioning nodes that managed time-keeping within network data centers and that the issue was mostly resolved by 4 p.m. Australian Eastern Standard Time.
Telstra, which provided 24.9 million mobile services as of 2025, said it conducted 395 welfare checks on customers who were unable to reach Triple Zero on Wednesday, six of whom needed assistance from emergency services.
Anika Wells, Australia’s communications minister, told Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) radio on Thursday morning that there had been no “adverse outcomes” from Triple Zero issues, but that the government would be seeking a full explanation from Telstra about how the outage occurred.
“Telstra needs to account for how and why that has occurred because Australians are right to expect that as a baseline service from their telco,” she said.
Wells on Wednesday said that the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) and the Triple Zero Custodian will conduct full and thorough investigations into the network outage.
Telstra was in 2024 fined 3 million Australian dollars (2.1 million U.S. dollars) by ACMA for failing to comply with emergency call rules during a technical disruption.
The federal government in 2025 increased the maximum fine for telcos that fail to follow Triple Zero rules during outages to 30 million AUD (20.8 million USD)
