A Telstra outage today

8 July 2026

Like many Australians I received an unwelcome pop-up a couple of hours ago:

Since then, there have been periods of "SOS-only" where my phone can only connect to other towers from other telcos. I think I've seen the odd blip or two where it managed to get a data connection, but generally there's been no data. For reference I'm located in Hobart.

This is already causing serious chaos, which is being chronicled by the ABC. Trains have stopped running in Victoria, EFTPOS systems are down, and triple-zero (emergency) calls are apparently affected in some cases. Hopefully a fix can be deployed as quickly as the original problem. We will see.

I'm one of the lucky ones—plenty of access to NBN-based WiFi, a little cash in the wallet, and other mobile towers in range that could handle an emergency call if I needed to make one. Regional Australians reliant on Telstra don't have it so good. Nor do mobile businesses like taxi drivers. I'm largely ignorant of how mobile phone networks function but I sometimes wonder if domestic "roaming" would be a good idea for national redundancy. You can do it yourself with multiple SIM cards but it's a lot of complexity and friction to push onto small business operators who just need their data to work.

Good luck to all the commuters and data-users out there today.

Tom's Opinions Blog by Thomas Karpiniec
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