Trains and emergency calls affected after major outage at Australia's largest telecoms company

Trains and emergency calls affected after major outage at Australia's largest telecoms companyImage source, GettyImage caption, Telstra says Wednesday's outage was 'intermittent' but affected customers across AustraliaByLana LamSydneyPublished17 minutes agoA major outage at Australia's largest telecommunications company has led to cancelled train services, left thousands of customers without mobile coverage, and sparked an investigation into emergency calls that were not connected.Telstra's chief financial officer Michael Ackland apologised for the issue which began at 04:30 local time on Wednesday and affected "some mobile calls and data services". About six hours later, 90% of the network had been restored, he said. Time-keeping servers at data centres in Sydney and Melbourne were to blame but the exact cause was unknown. It was not a suspected cyber attack.Australia's Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the outage was "deeply concerning".Telstra described the outage as "intermittent" but acknowledged the impact had been "national".Ackland said the telecoms company was conducting welfare checks on customers who had called emergency services during the outage."We don't believe this issue has impacted triple zero in the same way as other calls," he said."It uses different network settings, but we are continuing to investigate every angle on where it may have impacted triple zero if that has occurred."Asked if the country could still rely on its largest mobile network, Ackland said: "Australia can absolutely have faith in its biggest telco... we take these outages very very seriously."Our investment in resilience and cyber security and redundancy in our network is significant but it is a big and complex network and from time to time, issues do occur."Communications Minister Anika Wells confirmed that welfare checks were being made for about three dozen...