08/07/2026
★ 2143: Final entry. Some good news for MVNO customers who were without credit and couldn't recharge their accounts - the APIs behind the functionality are now working meaning that those using Boost, ALDI, Belong, etc will have that functionality back. We also have a little bit of post incident discussion that seems to indicate that a loss of synchronization with Telstra's stratum 1 NTP (and more accurate pps) servers which are core to AAA and also general functioning of a LTE/5GNR network. Yes, there are supposed to be alternate clock sources (most sourcing data from GNSS), but that's their story as at this late hour. We likely won't know the true extent of what went wrong and why for some time, but multiple failures would have been needed as core infrastructure is designed to fail over and be redundant. There have been some persistent reports of LTE-M and other embedded devices eg public transit kiosks and ATM machines still having issues but this matter for the wider public should be firmly sitting in the "resolved" basket by the time you read this post.
★ 1232: In what can only be described as a terrible day for the telco, prepaid customers of Telstra and its in-house MVNO Boost have been unable to recharge their accounts. Worse still, data leakage has taken place with reports from users of 2FA text messages being sent to phone numbers entirely unrelated to their account. When contacted for comment, an individual at Customer Care called Janine confirmed that recharges/topups/rollovers were unable to be processed and there was no ETR for the fault at this stage.
★ 0810: Towers are beginning to open back up and normal service shouldn't be far away for outliers - it may pay to restart your phone or toggle airplane mode on and off to force a reconnection if you still have "No Service/SOS Only" on your screen.
★ 0800: many are reporting service is returning but it is still piecemeal with some areas remaining affected. Expect full resolution within the hour. The official Telstra outages checker at telstra.com.au/outages simply returns "something went wrong" when a postcode is supplied. Major news networks have taken this up including the ABC.
★ 0745: Emergency Management Minister Kristy McBain was quoted as saying "The Australian Government has been advised by Telstra that there is an outage affecting a large number of mobile calls and connections [..] We are also aware the issue is also affecting Victoria's V/Line regional train services. [..] We understand Telstra is working on resolving the issue, and arrangements are being made for affected rail passengers". While McBain stated "Australian phones are also required to fall back to other networks for 000 access" in rural areas there may be marginal coverage by other providers, leaving some in areas not serviced by Optus or Vodafone (which is a significant area especially in northern Vic when outside 20km of townships) with no emergency service access.
★ 0600: Mass outage affecting Telstra Mobile customers with many unable to authenticate and seeing "SOS Only" or "No Signal" (depending on if another carrier network is nearby for emergency calls to fail over to). This includes Boost and other MVNOs like ALDI etc.
