Telstra outage in Australia disrupts trains and payment

Australia's biggest telecoms firm Telstra said it was urgently investigating the cause of a nationwide outage on July 8 that cut phone services for thousands of customers, disrupted wireless payments and halted trains.



Issues involving networking equipment at Telstra's data centres in Sydney and Melbourne may have caused the outage, chief financial officer Michael Ackland said, adding that there was no evidence of a cyberattack or malicious interference.



"At this stage, we have nothing to indicate malicious activity... but we continue to investigate, we continue to remain curious and explore every avenue. But we have nothing on that," he told reporters.



"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."



About 90 per cent of services have been restored. The outage lasted roughly five hours for many customers.