Nationwide Telstra outage forces Magic Millions sale delay 

Auction house Magic Millions has delayed the countdown to its July Digital Sale by 24 hours in response to a Telstra outage that affected phone and internet customers nationwide for more than 12 hours on Wednesday.

The telco giant’s technical issue also impacted Racing Australia’s systems, leading to the late release of Saturday’s metropolitan fields including Sydney’s 10-race card at Randwick.

Acceptances for the weekend’s Caulfield, Doomben, Morphettville, Belmont, Broome and Darwin meetings, as well as Randwick, were posted on Racing Australia despite the Telstra outage.

Fields were also released on Racing Australia for Friday’s thoroughbred meetings in NSW, Victoria and Queensland.

Magic Millions informed buyers via social media that bidding on its 87-lot catalogue would now start counting down from 12pm (AEST) on Thursday because of the Telstra outage.

There have been no reports of corporate bookmakers or the TAB retail network being impacted by the “intermittent” outages.

Telstra’s chief financial officer Michael Ackland, standing in for chief executive Vicki Brady, who is on leave, fronted the media confirming the telco was investigating the issue.

“We don’t yet know the root cause, we are investigating that urgently,” said Ackland, who ruled out “malicious activity” as the reason for the outage.

“We know customers rely on our connectivity it has been a big disruption to many people’s days.”

“We apologise for that.”

Triple-0 calls were initially thought to be unaffected by the outage, but it later emerged that up to 20 calls in Victoria to the emergency line could not be connected, as the company said that 90 per cent of services had been restored by 2pm. By 5.30pm, Telstra said all its services had been restored, with the company blaming a software defect for the outage.

Customers of Belong, Everyday Mobile, Boost Mobile, Tangerine and Aldi, which operate on the Telstra network, also reported they had experienced issues with their phone services.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority also revealed it was opening an investigation into the service failure to ensure Telstra met its regulatory obligations.