A major communications outage has struck Tasmania, disrupting local internet and phones services, after the cables that connect the island state to mainland Australia was found severed.
Telstra on Tuesday announced on Twitter that its mobile and home broadband services had been disrupted and that they were getting the issue fixed as soon as possible.
Telstra also assured customers that some voice calls to and from Tasmania may still be getting through, including triple zero calls which were not impacted.
Prior to this announcement, Telstra revealed that one of its fibre cables has been cut while a second cable that has been taken offline is under investigation.
The outages have affected ADSL and NBN internet services, some free-to-air TV and radio stations and mobile data services.
Meanwhile, a TPG Telecom spokeswoman said Vodafone, TPG and iiNet customers in Tasmania had also been affected.
“Mobile, home broadband and NBN customers across our brands in Tasmania are currently experiencing connectivity issues due to the two third party cable issues,” the spokeswoman said.
“Customers may have limited or no service,” she said.
She continue that triple-zero calls will divert to another network, if available, and warned call wait times to TPG contact centres were higher than usual.
Earlier on Tuesday, electricity distributor TasNetworks said it was experiencing a “major statewide internet outage” caused by “upstream provider issues”.
In an update on Facebook, TasNetworks said services were progressively being restored across the state.
“Some connectivity is back, but some ISPs are still down, so some customers will still not be able to access our external website,” it said.
Optus said Tasmania’s network was “currently impacted” in an alert on its website, with 5G mobile and internet coverage, as well as 4G internet coverage unavailable.
“Our network team is working to resolve a transmission issue impacting the OPTUS network in this area,” the alert said.
NBN Australia said in an update on Twitter the communications outage was impacting some of its services.
With AAP