Australia experienced another nationwide mobile outage on Wednesday, this time hitting the largest provider, Telstra. As a result, many people were unable to make phone calls, make emergency calls or make mobile payments, and train traffic was also affected. According to media reports, the airport in Perth, Western Australia, was particularly badly affected. In the state of New South Wales in the southeast, numerous trains have broken down and some have been replaced by buses. The problem has now been largely resolved, Telstra has announced, and there have already been calls for an explanation from politicians. People were also asked not to call 911 for testing purposes, reports ABC.
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There are always major disruptions in Australia
According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Telstra first identified the problems at 4:30 a.m. local time on Wednesday and reported good progress in resolving them five hours later. At that point, 90 percent of calls were possible again, and a similar number of connections were also made available to the Internet again. According to the provider, the cause of the problems was an error in a system for time synchronization of the mobile network, so there is no evidence of a cyber attack. Kristy McBain, the Minister for Emergency Management, has since assured people that she shares the frustration over the outage.
There are a number of reports on ABC about the concrete consequences of the mobile phone disruption. In an office building in Sydney, employees were unable to work for two hours because two-factor authentication was not available to log in to their computers. They would have looked at football as an alternative. Elsewhere, taxis could not be paid for, so a reporter had to give his driver his phone number and assure him that he would pay later. Hundreds of traffic lights were out in South Australia. The outage was a significant problem for many businesses. Mining industry workers trying to travel to remote mine sites faced hours-long delays.
Australia has repeatedly experienced such major disruptions in recent years, but the focus was primarily on Telstra’s competitor Optus. In November 2023, a software upgrade caused a massive outage of internet connections, affecting more than ten million people. At that time, no emergency calls could be made, numerous payment terminals did not work and some trains were canceled. In the fall, a faulty firewall update at Optus caused emergency services to be down for hours in large parts of the country, which has been linked to several deaths. The main problem at the time was that the failure was difficult to notice. Things were different for Telstra customers now.
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