Major Telstra outage fixed

Telstra has pinpointed the cause of an outage that caused widespread disruption across Melbourne.

Telstra has blamed a faulty device for a network outage that caused widespread disruption across Melbourne yesterday, with Myki, eftpos and corporate ser­vices knocked out across the state.

“The fault was caused by a device in the network behaving in a way that wasn’t expected and it impacted part of the enterprise IP network in Victoria,” a Telstra spokesman said on Friday.

Businesses across Victoria were hit by the widespread network outage just a day after Telstra announced an extra $250 million to fix its core network. The fixed-line outage, which began about 2pm, took out NAB and MEbank’s internet banking. Jetstar’s check-in system and Myer’s eftpos network were also affected.

Other business and enterprise customers across the state including Medibank, Reece Plumbing, Channel 31, Virgin Active, Monash University and The Royal Women’s Hospital were affected, marking Telstra’s seventh major outage this year.

It is understood Labor’s campaign headquar­ters and electorate offices across the state were also affected.

“The network issue was restored around 8.30pm and we are working with customers to confirm that their services are up and running,” a spokesman said.

“We apologise to all affected customers and their customers for the impact that this has caused.”

The outage comes less than 24 hours after the telco’s boss, Andy Penn, ­announced a $250m investment to improve its core network.