Trains, emergency calls affected after major outage at Australia telecoms company

SYDNEY —Australia’s biggest telecoms company said on Wednesday it was urgently investigating the cause of ‌a nationwide outage that cut mobile and internet services for thousands of customers, disrupted wireless payments and halted trains.Telstra’s chief financial officer Michael Ackland apologized for the issue which began at 04:30 local time on Wednesday and affected “some mobile calls and data services”.A fault involving specialized servers that manage time synchronisation at Telstra’s data centers in Sydney and Melbourne may have caused the outage, Ackland said, adding ​there was no evidence of a cyberattack.Services were fully restored about 12 hours later, he said. Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the outage was “deeply concerning”.Telstra described the outage as “intermittent” but acknowledged the impact had been “national”.Ackland said the telecoms company had conducted welfare checks on customers who had called emergency services during the outage, with six requiring immediate help.Back-up systems, which divert emergency calls through other mobile carriers, largely worked as they should, he added.Asked if the country could still rely on its largest mobile network, Ackland said: “Australia can absolutely have faith in its biggest telco… we take these outages very very seriously.”Our investment in resilience and cyber security and redundancy in our network is significant but it is a big and complex network and from time to time, issues do occur.”confirmed that welfare checks were being made for about three dozen calls to emergency services that did not go through but that the “core triple-zero system remains operational”.Communications Minister Anika Wells said the country’s telco regulator, the Australian Communication and Media Authority, will investigate the outage.In Victoria, all regional train services were cancelled due to the outage while some regional services in New South Wales were also disrupted. National freight services were also affected.Payment systems were also down with about 80,000 businesses using the Tyro app affected.Last September, a systems outage at Optus — the second largest telecoms company in Australia – led to three deaths after hundreds of people across more than half the country were unable to call emergency services for 13 hours.