Internet services in Tasmania were restored on Tuesday evening after a six-hour outage caused by two of the three cables connecting the island state to the mainland being taken offline.
Around 1pm, Tasmanians began reporting being cut off from the internet and being unable to make calls. The outage also affected electronic payment services in the state, with stores reportedly requiring customers to pay with cash.
Around 1pm an outage affected both Telstra fibre cables connecting #tasmania to mainland Australia resulting in near total loss of all data services in Tas inc Internet providers, other mobile companies and some TV channels
— Digital Tasmania (@digitaltasmania) March 1, 2022
At 7pm, a Telstra spokesperson said the services had been restored.
“Thanks to the work of our teams on the ground, restoration is progressing well and we’re beginning to see services come back online across Tasmania,” the spokesperson said.
Telstra had identified that two cables carrying mobile and fixed data traffic to the state had been taken out. One had been cut during civil works, while the cause of the problem with the other cable was under investigation.
“Our network across the Bass Strait is configured with multiple redundancies, with the two main links providing back up for each other, and a third, smaller link being available for priority traffic – such as triple zero and voice – on the very rare chance both main links go down,” the spokesperson said.
“Unfortunately this is what has occurred.
“We have crews at the separate sites to repair the cable and get traffic back online. The issues at each site are unrelated.”
The company had determined “massive damage” had been done to the cable in Melbourne by “third party civil works”, forcing Telstra workers to haul and connect nearly one kilometre of new fibre.
The outage had affected ADSL and NBN internet services, some free-to-air TV, radio stations and mobile data services, which the company said had been congested.
Tasmania is connected to the internet via three cables – two from Telstra and one from Basslink. The Basslink cable was unaffected by the outage.
Network data showed connectivity in the early afternoon was about 30% of normal levels for the state.
