National outage has hit Telstra in ‘isolated pockets’ after it conducted a software upgrade

Australia’s biggest telco has had a two-hour outage, cutting off some mobile phone voice calls in ‘isolated pockets’ as it deployed more artificial intelligence systems across its network.

Telstra’s outage lasted about two hours, affecting some mobile users in isolated pockets nationally.

Australia’s biggest telco Telstra has been hit with an outage that shut down calls on some mobile phones nationally for about two hours, after it completed a software upgrade.

The outage hit mobile users in isolated pockets across the country shortly after midday on Tuesday.

Unlike Optus’s network meltdown last November – which was also the result of a software upgrade and cut off more than 10 million Australians from phone and internet services – Telstra customers could continue to use their data.

This meant they could make calls on non-cellular platforms such as Apple FaceTime, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.

Crucially, a Telstra spokesman said its testing showed “no impact on calls to triple-0”.

He said by 2,30pm access was restored, with the shutdown lasting about two hours.

“The issue was caused by a software change and was fixed by rolling that back. We’re sorry for the impact on people’s days,” the spokesman said.

Telcos have been investing heavily in network resilience. Telstra chief executive Vicki Brady has said the Optus outage placed it front of mind for customers.

Telstra chief executive Vicki Brady.

Telstra has been deploying artificial intelligence to better detect and resolve faults. Group executive for product and technology Kim Krogh Andersen last month told The Australian AI was being particularly effective in remote alarm monitoring. Alarms assist operators to better understand network failures but the problem is that there are many of them.

“Historically we have a lot of alarms that we couldn’t prioritise because we are humans. But will LLM (large language models) and AI more broadly we are actually able to process much more data and therefore also be able to take much more of these alarms and data into account when we do preventive maintenance,” Mr Krogh Andersen said.

“When we do maintenance, we predict what’s going to happen in the network in the future, so AI is such an important part of how we build out the network, how we operate the network and our core business going forward.”

Ishwar Parulkar, global chief technologist at cloud computing provider Amazon Web Services (AWS), said typically during outages engineers sift through logs and lines of code to detect the fault – a process that AI can complete within minutes.

“It’s like the equivalent of thousands of experts looking at this data. It’s pretty significant, especially the troubleshooting space because this space is all about consuming lots of lots of data and then making sense out of it,” Mr Parulkar said last month.

Optus is continuing to reel from the aftermath of the November outage, and the telco now the subject of potential takeover talks between its owner Singtel and Canadian private equity giant Brookfield.

An upgrade on the Singtel internet Exchange, or STiX, triggered the shutdown last year, which lasted about 12 hours and cut off about 40 per cent of Australians from phone and internet services.

During the shutdown – which ultimately led to Kelly Bayer Rosmarin resigning as Optus’ chief executive – almost 2700 Australians could not dial triple-0 for emergency services, while the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman recorded a surge in complaints from small businesses, some of which lost as much as $10,000 in profits.

Last month, Singtel said the outage cost it about $61.2m and dragged its overall quarterly profit down 13 per cent to $S465m ($531.61m).