Winter Afternoons with Angie McBride - 9th July 2026

A little while ago, uh, CFO of Telstra, Michael Ackland, held a press conference.

Uh, he explained, uh, the issue affecting triple zero calls.

Last night, we identified a subsequent issue that was impacting some calls, including triple zero, and the nature of this only became apparent as we resolved the original issue.

In these cases, when calling triple zero, some people received an error message, and then their phone would go and try to connect to an alternative mobile network as it should.

The issue was a consequence of the same software defect that I talked to you about yesterday.

So while we, while we addressed the original issue, that subsequent issue remained ongoing and needed to be addressed in a different way.

Overnight, our teams made good progress, significantly reducing the occurrence of failed calls to triple zero, and we've now implemented a solution that has addressed the impact of this issue.

Now, mobile networks are complex, um, and we will continue to work through further changes to ensure we have the most robust solution that customers can feel confident in calling triple zero.

Our backup systems and welfare check process remains in place, of course, and we have not needed to complete a welfare check since that solution was put in place.

In total though, we completed six hundred and thirty-nine welfare checks from the start of this outage.

And this is a further Michael Ackland talking about the welfare check stats.

Two hundred and thirty callers advised by SMS responded that no assistance was required.

Four hundred and two cases required follow-up voice calls.

Of those four hundred and two cases, a hundred and seventy calls were passed to the police for either further welfare check or assistance.

And we had seven callers advised that they needed assistance in total, and their details were referred to the relevant emergency services organizations.

Senator Karen Little, uh, put up a post last night that her office had received the news that, uh, someone had died, uh, locally.

Um, a elderly person after failing to connect with triple zero during yesterday's Telstra outage.

Now, the police, uh, media actually commented on that post and said, "We have not been told of that, and we don't know if this has happened." We put in a message this morning to Karen Little's office, but we haven't heard back, uh, to see if they can clarify that and where they got that information from.

And also, uh, just a reminder, too, if you, uh, you may still be having issues, just reset your phone or restart your phone, but do not call triple zero to test if it is working, 'cause that causes more issues.

Uh, as well, this is Michael Ackland, uh, from Telstra talking on the rail network.

'Cause obviously there was, uh, the V- Vic Rail lines were out.

Uh, it affected some of our, uh, luxury, uh, trains here as well, and, uh, this is what he said

While the broader outage was resolved, yesterday we continued to work closely with a small number of enterprise customers on residual flow and impacts in their services.

This includes the Australian Rail Track Corporation or ARTC.

We'll keep working with our customers until every remaining issue is resolved, and as they complete all restoration and verification processes that they need to complete.