Telstra customers are livid after being struck with a third network outage in two months.
Users around the country couldn't make phone calls via their mobile or landline for more than an hour during the middle of the day on Tuesday, and took to social media to complain.
The telco quickly responded to concerns and confirmed that the majority of issues were in Victoria and Tasmania, with patchiness also reported in Sydney, Perth and Brisbane.
"We are experiencing intermittent voice call failures and connection delays on our fixed and mobile networks predominantly in Victoria and Tasmania, but impacting other states sporadically," the company said.
It reported it had resolved the problem by 1.15pm.
It's another blow to the country's largest telco, which has endured a string of service failures since the start of the year.
Mass nationwide blackouts on March 17 and February 9 left eight million customers in the lurch for up to four hours, while another incident saw 500,000 pre-paid customers lose service briefly.
The outages have been blamed on human error and overseas connections, and the telco has launched an engineering review of its network with global experts.
Chief executive Andy Penn also publicly apologised to customers last week, and offered a free data day as recompense.
However, customers are furious about the network's continuing issues and flooded Twitter during the blackout with complaints using the #TelstraOutage hashtag.
"This #TelstraOutage thing is beyond the joke. Fix your network or charge reasonable prices. Premium is not justified anymore," one customer posted.
"We better be offered more than a bloody free data day. I pay good money for my mobile service," said Sam Roach on Telstra's Facebook page.
A Telstra spokesman said the outage was caused by a card failure in a media gateway in Victoria.
"While small, we appreciate the impact this outage had on the customers affected, and we apologise to them," the spokesman said.
About 500,000 people, or three per cent of Telstra's mobile customers, were affected by the outage.
The company promised to redouble its efforts to keep the network resilient.
