Telstra Blames Fire-Damaged Cable for Triple Zero Outage

Telstra's networks engineering executive Channa Seneviratne said the company was "deeply sorry" and had restored services by late afternoon. The company is investigating whether the cable was damaged by a third party, he said.

The outage drew sharp criticism from state transport officials and consumer advocates. The New South Wales transport minister said the disruption was "completely unacceptable" for a service relied on by millions of daily commuters.

Telstra said it would review its network redundancy protocols to prevent a single cable failure from taking down emergency call routing again.