Telstra mobile outage 'could be impacting' 000 calls: police
Telstra customers across Australia are reporting difficulties making calls and connecting to the internet on their mobile devices, with both 3G and 4G networks appearing to be affected.
NSW Police said the outages could be affecting people trying to call Triple Zero (000) or the Police Assistance Line (131 444). "The advice we have received indicates Telstra customer mobile phone calls to Triple Zero (000) should automatically be connected via another carrier; however, if you are experiencing problems use a landline," they said in a statement at 12.14pm.
Aussie Outages' live outage map, which shows complaints about network problems across all major capital cities, was reporting more than 10,000 incidences at about 10am. Complaints started rolling in on social media around the same time, with hundreds of Telstra customers taking to Twitter to report an inability to phone out.
At 12.55pm, a Telstra spokesman said the company's 4G voice and data traffic volume was continuing to be restored nationally after it bypassed hardware that had been preventing some customers from accessing the 4G mobile network. 3G voice and data volumes were also improving.
"We are working with many of our enterprise and government customers to ensure their services are restored as quickly as possible," he said.
Telstra earlier apologised for the outage, saying: "We are very sorry for the interruption to services, either directly to customers or through business and government services".
This is one of multiple incidents this month for Australia's biggest telecommunications company, which ran into difficulties in early-May after triple zero services were hit by a network issue that prevented people from calling the emergency number across the country. The government is formally investigating the 000 incident, which is believed to have been caused by a lightning-sparked fire at a cable pit east of Orange.
And on May 1, Telstra had an outage leaving customers across the country unable to make and receive voice calls for about three hours due to an outage on the National Broadband Network and 4G.
Some customers have called for the telco to offer free data days to make up for the inconvenience, an approach Telstra has taken in the past after previous outages, while others are pushing for financial compensation.