Queensland police are carrying out urgent welfare checks on over a dozen individuals whose emergency calls failed during a nationwide telecommunications outage.The incident, which began around 4am on Wednesday, saw more than 17 people attempt to contact Triple Zero but were unable to connect.Police are collaborating with Telstra to identify all failed calls, with Policelink conducting welfare checks.Despite the outage, Queensland Police confirmed the Triple Zero service remains operational, urging people in emergencies to continue calling.

Telstra attributed the outage to a 20-year 'time travel' glitch caused by a firmware upgrade issue, with a second network fault affecting calls hours after the initial problem.The telco advised customers to wait up to 90 seconds for a connection or use an alternative phone if the error persisted.

Telstra faces potential penalties in the tens of millions of dollars over the incident, following a previous $3 million fine in 2024 for a similar outage.The outage impacted over 300 Triple Zero calls across Australia, highlighting ongoing challenges with critical communication infrastructure.