A major Telstra outage began early Wednesday, disrupting mobile calls and data across the country and affecting trains, emergency services, and other critical operations.

Telstra said it was investigating the fault and urged customers to retry connections, promising updates as the situation developed.

The company attributed the outage to a fault in the network’s time synchronization system and said there was no evidence of a cyberattack.

Analysts and policymakers argue for structural reforms to improve resilience, including mandatory cross-carrier redundancy and regulatory measures that hold carriers accountable for infrastructure failures.

The analysis accompanying the report is adapted from The Conversation and republished under a Creative Commons license.

Regulators are moving toward enforceable rules, replacing self-written consumer codes and requiring publishable outage maps and visibility, though no hard reliability standard exists yet.

Telstra and regulators have been engaging with media and stakeholders, including requests for further comment.

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Experts warn that more outages could occur and stress the need for collective cyber-resilience and proactive mitigation across sectors.

Advice for businesses and public services includes keeping cash as a backup, enabling wifi calling, and using multiple connection types and providers for essential functions.

Officials emphasized reducing reliance on a single telecom network for critical public services and transportation infrastructure.