Telstra outage preventing some mobile users from making calls now fixed

Telstra says it has fixed a national outage that left some Telstra customers unable to make calls. 

"The issue impacting mobile voice calls was fixed at around 2.30pm AEDT," said a Telstra spokesperson. "The issue was caused by a software change and was fixed by rolling that back. We're sorry for the impact on people's days."

The outage appears to have started around around 1pm. 

"If you're a Telstra customer you might be noticing some issues with mobile calls," tweeted the telco just before 2pm AEDT. "We're working on a fix and hope to get everything back up and running soon."

A Telstra spokesperson told WhistleOut that mobile data wasn't impacted, however.

"If you’re having trouble making calls, you can use services like Apple FaceTime, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and other data-based services to stay in touch while we get this issue sorted out," said the spokesperson.

In addition, calls to Triple Zero weren't affected. 

At this stage, it's not clear how many Telstra customers were affected by the issue. The Telstra page on Down Detector shows that over 2,000 people reported issues in the last two or so hours.

Some Telstra customers were not been able to make calls at all, while others have reported being able to make calls but with no audio. The issue appeared to also impact customers on Telstra-powered providers such as Boost Mobile and ALDI Mobile.

The outage didn't appear to affect all Telstra customers. WhistleOut has successfully made calls to and from Telstra, More, and Belong SIM cards.

Update 3pm 19/03: Telstra says it has resolved the issue 

Alex Choros

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Alex Choros is the Managing Editor of WhistleOut Australia and an award-winning journalist. He's been writing about consumer technology for over a decade and is an expert on the Australian telco sector, to the point where he knows far too many phone and internet plans by heart. In addition to leading the WhistleOut editorial team, Alex is responsible for ruining the office Sonos with his troubled taste in music.

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