Telstra has apologised to residents in an outback town in northern New South Wales after a massive mobile and landline outage that unexpectedly left them with minimal communications for an entire weekend.
The telco said it had scheduled a planned outage to upgrade the 5G mobile site in Bourke, 370 kilometres north-west of Dubbo, but an automated text message that was supposed to notify residents a week prior failed to send.
Telstra says work on the upgrade will continue until Friday.
"Unfortunately our investigation has uncovered the text message system that goes out a week prior to an upgrade — there was a glitch and it hasn't gone out," Telstra's northern NSW regional general manager Michael Marom said.
In a separate incident, landline services at Bourke — home to more than 2,600 people — were also affected on the weekend due to a hardware fault, which has since been rectified.
"Certainly our sincerest apologies to the residents and businesses in the Bourke area that were impacted by the intermittent outage that started due to the upgrade work on Saturday afternoon," Mr Marom said.
Dubbo resident Leanne Harvey said she was "distressed" when she tried and failed to call her elderly parents for Mother's Day on Sunday.
"Dad hasn't been well and we don't have family out there to support them," Ms Harvey said.
"So I'm just hoping everything's OK and they haven't needed to contact the ambulance, which they have had to do recently on a few occasions.
"It just isn't acceptable — I don't know how they think this is acceptable in this day and age."
Mr Marom said residents would be able to call emergency services as long as there was service from other network providers.
"Triple-0 is network-agnostic, so as long as there's mobile service available, you can call," he said.
The people of Bourke will continue to experience intermittent interruptions to mobile services in the area while Telstra completes the upgrade work, which is due to finish on May 19.
"Our crews are working as hard as they can and assuming there's no unforeseen issues with weather or other delays we should be able to finish that work prior to that date," Mr Marom said.
He said Telstra was reviewing the system involved in the SMS notification failure, but said Bourke would have a "much improved" service once upgrades the were completed.
