“We’re looking into an issue affecting some mobile calls and data connections. If you’re having trouble connecting at first, try again, as it may work on a retry. We’re on it and will share an update as soon as it’s fixed. Thanks for bearing with us,” the company said.

Following this, Victoria’s regional train services reported being inoperable after an issue in its radio network, an issue that was later determined to be connected to the Telstra outage.

“Due to a radio network fault affecting the network, services are currently unable to operate,” the agency said.

“Passengers are advised to defer travel where possible.”

It was later discovered that some NSW regional trains were also impacted.

Then, Western Australia police announced that calls to 000 were also impacted by the outage.

“If you have a vulnerable family member, friend, neighbour or co-worker, consider offering support during the service disruption,” WA Police said.

“If you are affected and do not have access to an alternative mobile or landline service, police recommend making arrangements with a neighbour, family member, or friend so you can access a working telephone in an emergency.

“Police communications systems are not affected.”

EFTPOS machines were also reportedly impacted.

“We’re aware of an issue with a national telephone network provider and that some customers may not be able to connect to the 4G network right now to process EFTPOS transactions,” said EFTPOS machine company Tyro.

Acting communications minister and Minister for Regional Development and Emergency Management Kristy McBain said the Albanese government had “been advised by Telstra that there is an outage affecting a large number of mobile calls and connections”.

She added that the government had been told that “Telstra is working on resolving the issue and arrangements are being made for affected rail passengers. Like all telcos, Telstra must notify customers and emergency services of any major outage.”

As Minister McBain pointed out, Australian phones are to fall back on other networks for emergency 000 calls when outages strike.

In the lead-up to a press conference, at around 9:45, Telstra said in a statement that it had restored around 90 per cent of its network.

“We’ve made good progress restoring services, with around 90 per cent of calls and data now flowing successfully across the network,” Telstra said.

“Our teams are working as quickly as possible to restore remaining services and get all customers back online.

“We know how much our customers rely on our network and understand just how much of a disruption this is to your day.

“For that, we’re so sorry. We’ll share further updates until all is resolved.”

Additionally, Telstra CFO Michael Ackland said the issue was first identified at 4:30am today and impacted a number of nodes on its network. When just some of these nodes are not operating properly, it can impact other parts of the network.

“We’ve been able now to restore some of these nodes, but that will take time for that to reset across all the 1,000s of servers across the network,” he said.

“We believe that just under 90 per cent of calls and data services at this point are now working correctly, so customers who are having trouble making a call, I encourage you to try again and depending on how the call is routed through the network, it may connect successfully on another attempt.

“If you’re at home or in the office, and you have access to Wi-Fi, we encourage you to use that if you are connected to Wi-Fi services, such as WhatsApp messaging, or Teams or Facebook or Facetime.”

The company added that it is currently unsure of the cause of the outage but added that it was conducting welfare checks on 000 calls that had failed.

“We don’t yet know the root cause. We are investigating that urgently, and we’ll provide updates as soon as we get more information about the root cause. We know that customers across the whole community rely on our connectivity, and this network challenge has caused many issues, and it’s been a big disruption to many people’s days, and we apologise for that,” Ackland said.

“It has been intermittent, but it has been national, so it doesn’t matter where you’re located. It is not around [a] particular state, it’s not about regional metro.”