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A laundry list of cancelled train services is confronting Victorian commuters for a second consecutive day, as the impacts of Wednesday’s nationwide Telstra outage continue.
The outage began at 4.30am on Wednesday, and while Telstra had restored most phone call capabilities by later that morning, V/Line has remained shuttered for 24 hours with no estimated time for rectification.
Another 95 services between Southern Cross Station and the state’s regional cities have been cancelled so far on Thursday.
“That train radio system actually locates the train and talks back to our control room. If we don’t see where that train is, we stop the train immediately because that’s a safety measure that we put in place as part of our safety procedures”, V/Line’s CEO Will Tieppo explained.
These radios rely on Telstra, and Tieppo said the terms of V/Line’s contract with the telecom meant it could not establish a fallback communication network with other providers.
Exacerbating commuters’ troubles on Wednesday evening was the fact that V/Line did not have enough buses to replace the more than 300 cancelled services.
The rail service was further hampered by the inability to contact bus companies during the outage.
V/Line has since announced that customers who were delayed by at least 60 minutes can apply for compensation.
As the morning commute begins, regional Victorians are counting the cost in time and fuel.
Karen, who lives in Yarrawonga on the border with New South Wales, was travelling three hours to Melbourne on Thursday.
“It’s taken me over an hour to get to Benalla, because it’s really foggy and there are a bloody lot of potholes around,” she told 3AW. “It’s really stressful.”
The Telstra outage was attributed to a software issue that sent the network’s timekeeping systems back almost 20 years, to 2006.
Modern mobile networks rely on precise timing to authenticate devices, and the incorrect date caused parts of the network to reject customers’ phones.
The outage, which began early on Wednesday morning, also caused more than 300 Triple-Zero calls to fail. Six people told Telstra they needed help after the telco and police carried out about 300 welfare checks.
It also affected interstate train services, elevators at a major Victorian university and the pagers of emergency services.
Late on Wednesday night, Telstra confirmed it was urgently investigating a second network fault that was stopping some calls from connecting, including to Triple Zero, hours after the telco said it had resolved the first outage.
David Swan is the technology editor for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. He was previously technology editor for The Australian newspaper.Connect via X or email.From our partners
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