18,800 Emergency Calls Sat Inside Telstra's 13-Hour Outage Window

New analysis from Airteam, conducted by Primara Research, modelling Victoria’s Triple Zero call data at a national scale, reveals an estimated 18,800 genuine emergency calls would ordinarily have been placed nationally during the 13.5-hour window of Wednesday’s nationwide Telstra fault. That works out to an estimated triple-0 call every 2.6 seconds nationally. An estimated 78% of all triple-0 calls in Australia are made from a mobile phone, and Telstra operates the country’s largest mobile network, meaning a fault at this scale sits across the primary channel most Australians rely on to reach emergency services.

The figure is derived from Victoria’s own published Triple Zero data, which recorded a call every 10.2 seconds across 2024-25, scaled to Australia’s population. It is a modelled estimate of ordinary call volume, not a count of calls that failed, but it establishes the scale of demand sitting inside any national network fault of this length.

Broken down by service, the same window implies an estimated 9,960 police calls and 7,030 ambulance calls nationally, along with approximately 52 cardiac-related calls, the category most sensitive to any delay in connection.

For most Australians, there is no practical fallback. Landlines have largely disappeared from Australian homes, and even where one exists, a caller away from home, in a car, at work or outdoors has no way to reach it. When the primary mobile channel fails, the alternative isn’t a backup device, it’s often no path to triple-0 at all.

The exposure compounds with time. A fault lasting a single hour sits across an estimated 1,390 emergency calls nationally. Extended to a full 24-hour period, that figure rises to an estimated 33,450 calls, more than the population of many regional Australian towns, all needing a functioning network to get through.

“This is an example of a time where a single point of failure isn’t safe or okay, because the demand behind it never stops, and it’s life critical,” said Rich Atkinson, Executive Director of Airteam. “At one call every 2.6 seconds nationally, a 13-hour fault sits across nearly 19,000 genuine calls for help. Critical infrastructure has to be built so no single point can ever carry that much life-critical demand alone.”

“Victoria’s own data shows how relentless this demand is, day in, day out,” said Peter Drennan, Head of Research and Data at Primara Research. “When you scale that nationally and hold it against a 13-hour fault, it puts the numbers into real terms. It shows the true significance of what’s at stake when systems are built around a single point of failure rather than redundancy.”

Background & Methodology

ABOUT THE DATA

Analysis for this release was completed by Primara Research for Airteam, using publicly available data from the Victorian Government Triple Zero website, extrapolated out to represent the total Australian population.

ABOUT AIRTEAM

Airteam is a leading Australian software engineering firm that builds complex software and analytical models for Australian government and enterprise clients.

ABOUT PRIMARA RESEARCH

Primara Research is an Australian, independent research and data firm. Learn more about our work with journalists

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