🔴 UPDATE: Telstra hit by a second 000 fault as welfare checks pass 395
Hours after Telstra said the outage was fixed, a second fault emerged. At about 9pm on Wednesday, chief financial officer Michael Ackland confirmed a secondary issue was hitting some calls, including Triple Zero, with callers getting an error message before their phone tried another network. By Thursday morning Telstra said it had cut those 000 errors by about 90%.
"While we've restored the issue that caused today's outage, we've identified a secondary issue impacting some calls including triple-0," Ackland said.
The emergency-call fallout also grew through the day. By 5.30pm Wednesday Telstra had carried out 395 welfare checks, referred 79 people to police for a physical check and recorded 6 who said they needed help, with more than 300 checks linked to failed or dropped 000 calls. Police reported no adverse outcomes at this stage, while Telstra maintained its backup systems worked as they should throughout.
The leadership was thin on the ground as it unfolded. Telstra chief executive Vicki Brady was on leave overseas and is cutting her family holiday short to return home later this week, while Communications Minister Anika Wells cut short her own leave to front the media.
The disruption ran into a second day. V/Line suspended all its services on Thursday, including the morning peak. In New South Wales, buses replaced trains on the Hunter Line between Newcastle Interchange, Maitland, Scone and Dungog, and on the Southern Highlands Line between Campbelltown and Moss Vale, with some NSW TrainLink services also cancelled or run by coach.
"Trains are still not running between these stations due to the ongoing effects of yesterday's external telecommunication issue," a Transport for NSW spokesman said.
Communications Minister Anika Wells cut short her leave today to confront the fallout from a national Telstra outage that stopped trains, shut down EFTPOS terminals and left some Australians unable to call Triple Zero.
Fronting a Canberra press conference alongside Emergency Management Minister Kristy McBain, Wells confirmed the media watchdog would launch a full investigation and that Telstra would have to explain how a single fault took down the country's biggest network. The press conference itself started more than 30 minutes late, leaving reporters and anxious customers waiting for answers.
"The Australian Communications and Media Authority will conduct a full investigation, and Telstra will need to account for how and why this outage has happened," Wells said.
Some Australians couldn't reach 000, and welfare checks are still running
The most serious fallout was on Triple Zero. New South Wales and Western Australia police said some Telstra customers had been unable to get through to 000 during the outage. Telstra is running about three dozen welfare checks, tracing calls that dropped out and handing any numbers it cannot reach to state and territory emergency services.
Wells said the backup that reroutes stranded calls to Optus, Vodafone and TPG had worked, that the core 000 system never went down, and that the overwhelming majority of calls got through. She would not put a figure on how many failed, and said she was not aware of anyone who had needed emergency help and missed out, while refusing to rule it out.
"It is very important that people do not make test calls to 000," Wells said. "Please only call Triple Zero if it is an emergency."
Kristy McBain attacks the shadow minister for checking the 000 line actually worked
In an extraordinary aside, McBain accused the opposition's own shadow communications minister of making test calls to 000 in the middle of the crisis.
"We teach our kids not to prank call 000, and I think it is absolutely outrageous that the shadow communications minister has been making test calls to 000," McBain said.
The spin does not survive a second look. Checking that the emergency line actually works in the middle of a national outage is exactly what a communications spokesman is there to do, and exactly what Wells's own department was doing through Telstra's welfare checks. That is oversight, not a prank.
It is not the first time McBain has swung first and missed. She accused Angus Taylor of lying about firefighters during the bushfires, an attack that did not hold up. Days like today are why voters check her claims before they buy them.
Telstra blames a software defect, and still can't find the root cause
Telstra and the government moved fast to kill off talk of a cyber attack or sabotage. Chief financial officer Michael Ackland, who fronted the media twice, said the company had identified a software defect but still had not isolated the root cause. The fault, effectively a broken clock at two data centres in Sydney and Melbourne, threw the network out of sync from about 4.30am, and about 90% was back by mid morning.
Wells took aim at politicians who had floated sabotage.
"When it comes to matters of national security, you shouldn't make stuff up," Wells said. "You've heard from Telstra's acting CEO that there is currently no evidence to suggest that those things are the case."
Angus Taylor said Anika Wells should have been across it sooner
The opposition leader, Angus Taylor, had spent the morning demanding the government front up, and called on Wells to cut short her leave while the country's biggest network was down.
"The government needs to explain what has gone on here, why has this happened, what they're going to do to make sure it's fixed and never happens again," Taylor said.
Anthony Albanese called the outage deeply concerning and said the government was working closely with Telstra. Wells said fines in the tens of millions could come into play once the investigation lands, and did not spare the sector.
"Telcos are the least trusted industry in our country, and days like today demonstrate exactly why Australians feel that way," Wells said.
A reporter tried to make it about Albanese's Kylie Minogue mess
The press conference briefly went off the rails when a reporter tried to steer it away from the outage entirely, asking Wells about Anthony Albanese's comments about women on a whisky podcast that have dogged him this week, and whether the government needed to rethink how it does media. Wells refused to bite, saying her only focus was getting Australians back online.
For a full timeline of how the outage unfolded, see our explainer on the Telstra outage.
So what is the most reliable network in 2026
The honest answer is a hybrid, and the honest catch is in the detail. No single network is bulletproof, satellite included. Starlink has had its own global outages, and because it's one company running one system, when it falls over everyone on it drops at once. Satellites also need open sky, struggle indoors and carry less than a tower. Anyone selling satellite as flawless is selling.
Two independent networks are still far harder to knock out than one, because towers and satellites fail for completely different reasons and almost never together. The mandated backstop is that phones must drop to any other carrier for Triple Zero when their own network dies. This morning even that didn't fully work, with Telstra confirming some emergency calls failed to connect. That is the sharpest argument yet for a genuine backup, one that doesn't depend on the network that broke.
The catch is that Telstra's own satellite texting is not that independent second network. The satellite is just a tower in space, and the message still routes back through Telstra's own systems to be delivered. So if what failed this morning was Telstra's core rather than its towers, the satellite path would likely have gone down with it. Real redundancy needs a satellite that doesn't depend on the carrier that broke.
Which is the case for letting Musk sell it direct. One News reported last week that Starlink is preparing a direct mobile service that analysts expect Australians to be buying by 2030, with Telstra already renting Musk's satellites for out of coverage texting and Optus waiting on its own SpaceX deal. A Starlink service you buy straight from Starlink doesn't sit behind Telstra's core, or Optus's, which is exactly why it would survive a morning like this one.
The market is already moving. Investment banks downgraded Telstra and other listed telcos this week over fears that Elon Musk's SpaceX will lure customers away from a highly concentrated industry.
None of this would have saved today's commute on its own. But every SOS icon on a Telstra phone this morning was a small advertisement for the same idea: the tower shouldn't be the only way home, and neither should any single company. The telcos put prices up in May to pay for reliability. The sky is now quoting for the same job.
