Telstra outage disrupts trains and payments across Australia

Australia’s biggest telecoms firm Telstra said on July 8 it was urgently investigating the cause of a nationwide outage that cut phone services for thousands of customers, disrupted wireless payments and halted trains.

A fault involving specialised servers that manage time synchronisation at Telstra’s data centres in Sydney and Melbourne may have caused the outage, chief financial officer Michael Ackland said. He added that there was no evidence of a cyberattack.

“At this stage, we have nothing to indicate malicious activity… but we continue to investigate, we continue to remain curious and explore every avenue. But we have nothing on that,” he told reporters.

The outage was reported across Australia but was intermittent, limiting its impact.

“It doesn’t matter where you’re located. It is not around a particular state, it’s not about regional or metro. It could impact any call that’s been routed through, and it was intermittent,” Ackland said.

The outage, which began in the early hours of July 8, lasted roughly five hours. About 90 per cent of services have been restored.

Telstra shares fell as much as 3.8 per cent on July 8, but later pared losses to trade 2.5 per cent lower in the afternoon.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said his government would work closely with Telstra as it investigated the outage.

“This is deeply concerning. It is very disruptive to people’s lives throughout the country. This is a national outage that has had varied effects,” Albanese told reporters.

Train services connecting Melbourne, Australia’s second-largest city, to regional towns were suspended due to communication issues and the operator advised passengers to defer travel where possible.

Some trains on the New South Wales state rural lines were also disrupted.

As payment platforms went down, taxi drivers lost work and some customers found themselves unable to pay for their rides.

Mark Whitbread, a cafe owner in the rural town of Bega around 400km south of Sydney, told ABC Radio he lost sales, as he relies on a self-service point-of-sale system.

“We are in the world of satellites and it just shouldn’t happen,” he said.

The Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman urged small businesses to keep detailed records of the outage’s effect and any losses incurred.

Telstra also said it was investigating reports of failed calls to Australia’s primary emergency number during the outage and was conducting welfare checks on customers who could not connect to the emergency number.

The incident follows a highly damaging outage for the country’s second-biggest telecoms firm, Optus, in 2025.

Optus, which is owned by Singtel, suffered a 13-hour disruption to emergency call services triggered by a network firewall upgrade, which possibly caused four deaths. Reuters