THE COMPANY behind the latest outage for thousands of Australian mobile phone users has come forward to apologise to users for disconnections that lasted longer than 18 hours this week.

But global telecommunications firm Ericsson said it was still investigating “the cause of the incident” that stopped Telstra wholesale customers from making phone calls or accessing the internet on their smartphones from Monday night.

The issues affected Telstra wholesale customers in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Hobart, Adelaide, and Darwin, with Telstra reporting connections were either “interrupted” or “intermittent”.

It’s understood several thousand Australians using Telstra services through discount carriers such as Woolworths Mobile, ALDIMobile, and Belong lost services after 6.30pm last night as part of the outage, and a Telstra spokesman said most of the customers had been reconnected by 2pm.

In a statement issued overnight, Ericsson said it apologised for the inconvenience to users.

“Ericsson today experienced an issue with the platform it provides to Telstra Wholesale to support its mobiles business,” the company said in a statement.

“During this time some Telstra Wholesale end users may not have been able to connect their services. The issue has been resolved and we are working to investigate the cause of this incident.”

media_camera The user-generated map of where Telstra users were experiencing issues. Picture: AussieOutages.com

Many turned to social media and AussieOutages to complain about the latest Telstra network connection problems, with some reporting they could only make phone calls to emergency numbers.

@Telstra is there any update on the outage affecting Fairlight NSW? Been down and on SOS signal since last night with no update on the website. — Danielle (@DanzH88) June 19, 2018

@Telstra what is going on with the current mobile phone outage. I have been SOS only since 5pm yesterday. — matt wiles (@spintwin5) June 18, 2018

The Ericsson network problem followed Telstra’s five-hour nationwide mobile phone outage on May 21 that was caused by multiple faults, with a software problem causing a domino effect inside its network.

Millions of Australians were left without access to voice and internet services on their mobile phones during the outage.

Despite restoring services, Telstra was unable to name the specific cause of the fault

In a statement, the company revealed the software problem “triggered multiple elements across the network to fail” and even backup systems designed to rescue the situation did not work.

Another Telstra mobile network outage on May 1 also disconnected mobile phones from the 4G network nationwide for two hours.

Despite the string of outages, Telstra networks group managing director Mike Wright previously rejected calls for all customers to be compensated, and said even a day of unlimited mobile data downloads would not be considered as customers “with such generous allowances” did not need it.

Originally published as Cause of Telstra outage revealed