Telstra customers experience outage, unable to make or receive calls

Telstra mobile customers were left unable to make or receive calls on Tuesday morning, as the telecommunications provider scrambled to fix a connection issue that had emerged overnight. The problem was eventually resolved after around 12 hours.

Reports of mobile calls not working started trickling through to social media and independent outage trackers at about 10pm on Monday night, at which point a spokesperson via the Telstra Twitter account said the telco’s teams were working as fast as they could to resolve the issue.

“We’re sorry for the late-night hassle and our technicians are working urgently to fix the issue,” the post said.

The outage continued into Tuesday morning, affecting all of Australia and peaking at 7.47am AEST with more than 1000 complaints, according to the website Downdetector. Telstra on Tuesday morning advised affected customers to turn airplane mode off and on to reset their connection, or to make a data call using Wi-Fi instead. It said mobile data and calls to Triple zero were not affected.

On Twitter, the telco referred to it as a “nationwide connection issue”.

“We’re sorry for the impact to the start of people’s day and are working urgently to fix the issue,” a Telstra spokesperson said on Tuesday morning.

By 8.30am some users were reporting that their services were working normally, and Telstra via its Twitter account said the issue had been largely rectified except for some users in NSW and Queensland. By 9am Telstra was describing services as “progressively coming back online”, and at 10.05am said it had been fixed.

A spokesperson advised that customers’ first attempt to make a call following the issues may fail, but if they retry it will go through.

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