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Telstra is working to restore services after a national outage that has affected calls and data this morning.
Telstra Chief Financial Officer Michael Ackland said the issue occurred at around 4:30am today due to an issue impacting nodes based in Sydney and Melbourne.
Ackland said, "We have been able to restore some of these nodes and it will take time to reset across the network".
Compensation for affected Telstra customers could be on the cards.
"We’ll work with all our customers once we’ve restored, that is our normal process, that we’ll work with customers," said Ackland.
After a four-hour outage in 2016 affecting eight million customers Telstra offered customers a free data day. Ackland said today's outage was smaller than the 2016 outage and intermittent in nature.
"I think this is one is a set of intermittent outages, if you go back to 2016, where there were more significant outages, I don't think it is of that scale."
Telstra is not sure yet how many customers were affected. "It could be tens of thousands, but I think it's more likely in the thousands."
Telstra believes just under 90% of calls and data should now be working and says customers having trouble making calls should make another attempt, as the call may be successful on further attempts.
Ackland said Triple Zero calls follow different settings, but the telco is investigating a small number of reports and conducting welfare checks. Ackland asked that customers should not test Triple Zero unless they're in an emergency.
Telstra does not yet know the root cause of the issue — which was related to how nodes keep time synchronised across the network — and is still investigating.
"At this stage we have nothing to indicate malicious activity," said Ackland.
Dylan Crismale
Digital Content Editor
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