Telstra outage which hit mobile phone users in New South Wales and Queensland fixed, telco says

By Audrey Courty

Posted 8h ago8 hours ago, updated 2h ago2 hours ago

Telstra says some of its mobile customers are still having trouble making phone calls, after an earlier outage which affected mobile networks in New South Wales and Queensland.

Key points:

• Some Telstra mobile users still can’t call landlines
• The telco suggests including the area code when dialling as a workaround
• Earlier, thousands of mobile users in two states were unable to make or receive calls

The outage began last night, with the telco suggesting a number of workarounds for customers who were unable to make or receive phone calls, including turning airplane mode on and off.

A Telstra spokesperson said the issue was fixed around 9am on Tuesday, but that a second issue was affecting customers calling landlines from their mobiles.

“Including the area code when dialling should fix it while we work to clear that up,” the spokesperson said. 

Telstra said the earlier outage was not related to a cyber attack.

“The issue was caused by a planned upgrade to our network that didn’t go to plan and had flow on effects,” the spokesperson said. 

“We’re sorry this occurred and we worked through the night to get things back up and running as quickly as possible.”

Earlier, Telstra had confirmed some customers were unable to make or receive calls. 

Incident reports registered on independent outage tracker Down Detector suggested the outage started at about 10pm on Monday.

Telstra said mobile data use was not affected, and suggested customers try making a data call using wi-fi or other apps such as FaceTime.

Last month, issues with Telstra’s mobile services in north-east Tasmania left communities without reliable phone and internet connection for days.