Telstra customers around Australia were unable to make voice calls on the telco's fixed and mobile networks for around two hours today due to yet another network fault at the telco.
"We are experiencing intermittent voice call failures and connection delays on our fixed and mobile networks – predominantly in Victoria and Tasmania, but impacting other states sporadically," a Telstra spokesperson advised at around midday.
Posters to telco user forum Whirlpool reported problems making and receiving calls around 12pm.
Internet call setups using the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) via Telstra also appeared to be affected.
A Telstra spokesperson said the issue was resolved at around 1:30pm, but admitted there were still some residual issues for a number of users. Customers continued complaining of lack of service throughout the afternoon.
He claimed only 3 percent of mobile customers, mostly located in Victoria and Tasmania, were affected.
The telco blamed a card failure in a media gateway in Victoria, which meant certain calls were unable to get through, for the service issue.
"While small, we appreciate the impact this outage had on the customers affected, and we apologise to them," the telco said.
"While we have the leading network in Australia, like any of our global peers there will always be issues that arise in such a large and complex technology environment.
"We are committed to redoubling our efforts on resilience in the network and part of that is conducting a major review in relation to the outages from last week and February."
It is the third nationwide outage to hit the telco in what has been an embarrassing start to the year for Telstra.
Just last week Telstra announced it would offer customers a free day of data in April to compensate for an overnight outage beginning March 16, which affected mobile, home and internet services.
It followed a similar event in Februarywhere services were taken out for three hours due to an "embarrassing human error".
Updated to reflect service restoration and issue attribution
