Queensland Police are conducting emergency welfare checks for more than a dozen people whose emergency calls failed during a nationwide blackout on Wednesday, as a second outage hit the network.
Police said 17 people tried to call Triple Zero during the outage, which began around 4 a.m., and were unable to connect to service.
A police spokesman said they were working with Telstra to identify all calls that failed, and Policelink would carry out welfare checks.
“Queensland’s Triple Zero service is still operating, and people experiencing an emergency should continue to call Triple Zero,” the Queensland Police Service said.
“Affected customers should check with their provider about what their outage means.”
Telstra said more than 300 Triple Zero phones across Australia failed during Wednesday’s outage, caused by a 20-year “time travel” bug caused by problems with software upgrades.
But in a statement released on Wednesday night, Telstra said a second network outage was affecting some phones – including Triple Zero phones – hours after the telco scrambled to resolve the midday outage.
Telstra said people calling Triple Zero could hear an error message when their phone tried to connect to another phone network, and urged anyone who couldn’t reach the emergency services to wait up to 90 seconds. If that failed, Telstra asked customers to call from another phone.
Telstra chief financial officer Michael Ackland was scheduled to speak to the media on Thursday morning.
The telecommunications company was fined more than $3 million in 2024 due to a bug that prevented some customers from reaching Triple Zero.
The company faces potential penalties in the tens of millions of dollars in Wednesday’s case.
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