A laundry list of cancelled train services is confronting Victorian commuters for a second consecutive day, as the impacts of Wednesday’s nationwide Telstra outage continue.
The outage began at 4.30am on Wednesday, and while Telstra had restored most phone call capabilities by later that morning, V/Line has remained shuttered for 24 hours with no estimated time for rectification.
Another 95 services between Southern Cross Station and the state’s regional cities have been cancelled today so far.
The regional rail service’s CEO Will Tieppo explained at midday Wednesday that regional train drivers rely on radio networks to locate other trains and communicate with the control centre.
These radios rely on Telstra, and Tieppo said the terms of V/Line’s contract with the telecom meant it could not establish a fallback communication network with other providers.
Exacerbating commuters’ troubles on Wednesday evening was the fact that V/Line did not have enough buses to replace the more than 300 cancelled services, further hampered by the inability to contact bus companies during the outage.
V/Line has since announced that customers who were delayed by at least 60 minutes can apply for compensation.
The Telstra outage – caused by a 20-year “time travel” glitch triggered by a botched firmware upgrade – also affected interstate train services, Triple Zero calls, elevators at a major Victorian university and the pagers of emergency services.
More to come.
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