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Queensland police are conducting urgent welfare checks on more than a dozen people whose emergency calls failed during Wednesday’s nationwide telecommunications outage, as a second fault hits the network.
Police said 17 people had attempted to call Triple Zero during the outage, which began about 4am, and could not connect to services.
A police spokesperson said they were working with Telstra to identify all failed calls, and Policelink would conduct welfare checks.
“The Queensland Triple Zero service remains operational, and people who are experiencing an emergency should continue to call Triple Zero,” the Queensland Police Service said.
“Impacted customers should check with their provider about what the outage means for them.”
Telstra said more than 300 Triple Zero calls across Australia failed during Wednesday’s outage, caused by a 20-year “time travel” glitch triggered by issues with a firmware upgrade.
But in a statement issued on Wednesday night, Telstra said a second network fault was affecting some calls – including Triple Zero calls – hours after the telco scrambled to resolve the daytime outage.
Telstra said people calling Triple Zero might hear an error message while their phone tried to connect to another mobile network, and urged anyone who could not reach emergency services to wait up to 90 seconds. If that failed, Telstra urged customers to call from another phone.
Telstra’s chief financial officer Michael Ackland planned to speak to media on Thursday morning.
The telco was fined more than $3 million in 2024 over an outage that stopped some customers reaching Triple Zero.
The company is facing potential penalties in the tens of millions of dollars over Wednesday’s issues.
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