Power outage cuts Telstra services

Carmel Percival tests her mobile phone again as she waits for the Telstra problem to be fixed.

MORE than 60,000 people were cast into the telecommunication wilderness yesterday as a power outage cut Telstra services across the region.

Telstra Country Wide area manager Barbara Wells said power fluctuations just before noon had alerted technicians to a problem at the Maryborough exchange, which was immediately shut down.

“An emergency generator kicked into action and the entire exchange had to be re-started,” Ms Wells said.

“Some (services) didn’t stand up straight away ... there was some data corruption in the exchange and everything had to be re-loaded.”

About 60,000 fixed line phones, ADSL, mobiles and data services in the Hervey Bay, Maryborough and Kingaroy areas were affected.

Among them was Carmel Percival of Maryborough who initially thought her account may have been at fault.

“I’d paid in advance but when my mobile wasn’t working too I thought something must be wrong with my account.”

Driving to Maryborough’s Telstra Shop in Lennox Street about 2pm, Ms Percival discovered she wasn’t the only customer without service.

Ms Wells said emergency service lines including triple-0 had been automatically diverted to other exchanges and major business customers were without service for up to three-and-a-half hours.

“We’re now working with Ergon to find the source of the power fluctuations.”