Queensland police have conducted welfare checks on 21 people who were unable to get through to Triple Zero (000) during Wednesday's major Telstra outage, which crippled mobile and data services across the country and left millions of Australians without reliable phone access for much of the day.
The widespread network failure — attributed to a critical software defect in Telstra's data centres — disrupted far more than phone calls. Payment terminals failed, and train networks across regional Victoria and parts of New South Wales ground to a halt. The full network was not restored until around 4pm on Wednesday.
All 21 Queensland Callers Accounted For
Queensland Police Superintendent Brook Dwyer confirmed that every one of the 21 people identified as having failed to connect to Triple Zero had since been contacted or located.
Of those callers, seven were found to have dialled accidentally and one person no longer needed help by the time officers followed up. Five callers had required Queensland Ambulance Service assistance, but in each case someone else had already called emergency services on their behalf before police made contact.
Seven people could not initially be reached by phone, prompting officers to drive to their homes in person. "We actually had seven matters where we couldn't get in touch with the persons so we sent police cars to all of those people," Superintendent Dwyer said.
One caller proved more difficult to locate — emergency services were temporarily unable to pinpoint their whereabouts — but police later tracked the person's phone and confirmed they were on holiday in Victoria and safe.
Superintendent Dwyer also passed on advice from Telstra: anyone who experienced difficulty reaching Triple Zero during the outage should have tried calling again, as second attempts were successfully connecting.
National Scale of the Triple Zero Problem Larger Than First Thought
Across the country, the impact on emergency call services was more significant than Telstra initially acknowledged. The company's chief financial officer, Michael Ackland, admitted on Wednesday afternoon that the volume of affected Triple Zero calls was higher than the telco had anticipated, prompting an expanded welfare check operation.
By Wednesday evening, Telstra had completed 333 welfare checks nationally on customers whose emergency calls had either failed to connect or dropped out after connecting. Those checks were carried out through SMS messages, phone calls and, where necessary, physical visits by police.
Around 79 people could not be contacted through remote means, resulting in police attending their homes to follow up. In New South Wales, police were asked to carry out 13 in-person welfare checks, with four still to be completed at the time of reporting, though no adverse outcomes had been found. Western Australia Police also confirmed they had conducted a welfare check.
Telstra also disclosed a secondary issue affecting some calls, including to Triple Zero, emerging later in the day. In those cases, callers received an error message while their handset attempted to connect to an alternative mobile network. Telstra advised customers experiencing ongoing difficulties to wait up to 90 seconds for their device to find an alternative network, or to use a different phone entirely.
Senator's Death Claim Disputed by South Australian Police
The human cost of the outage became the subject of a political dispute on Wednesday when a Liberal senator posted on social media claiming her office had received a report of a tragic death involving an elderly South Australian who was allegedly unable to reach emergency services during the outage.
South Australian Police swiftly and publicly disputed the claim, stating they were not aware of any death in the state linked to the Telstra outage. Police also responded directly to the senator's social media post to clarify their position.
Communications Minister Anika Wells sought to draw a distinction between Wednesday's disruption and previous network failures. "This is not a Triple Zero outage," she said. "This is a Telstra retail outage that has affected their customers right across the country." She pointed out that the situation differed from a previous Optus network failure that was linked to multiple deaths.
Telstra Apologises as Investigation Continues
Telstra's Michael Ackland offered a direct apology to customers caught up in the crisis. "We let customers down today in their hour of need. There's nothing that makes that untrue for many of those customers who are in traumatic situations, and we apologise for that deeply," he said.
The telco confirmed its teams had identified and isolated the software defect responsible for the outage, but said investigations into its underlying cause were ongoing. Ackland acknowledged that the incident pointed to systemic process issues that needed to be addressed. "The fact that it occurred means that there is something in our process that we need to fix and to change," he said.
Investigations into the full impact of the outage on emergency services were continuing, with authorities yet to draw a definitive line under the incident.
