Telstra blames MessageBank fault for flood of delayed missed call alerts
Telstra customers received waves of missed call and voicemail texts, some up to 100, for calls that never happened on Wednesday 4 November 2026. The telco said a MessageBank fault was to blame, that it was fixed, and that Triple Zero, voice calls and mobile data were unaffected.
Telstra said a fault in its MessageBank voicemail service caused customers to receive a burst of delayed missed call and voicemail notifications on Wednesday 4 November 2026. Customers reported SMS inboxes filling with alerts about calls from people who had not tried to ring them, and some said they received up to 100 such notifications while their phones never rang.
A Telstra spokesperson told the ABC the company was aware of the situation and it had been resolved. The spokesperson said in a statement that the telco had experienced a MessageBank issue "earlier today, which has now been fixed". The spokesperson also said customers might see "a number of delayed missed call and voicemail notifications arriving all at once". Telstra added that it was sorry for the confusion, and the spokesperson said there was no impact to Triple Zero calls, voice calls or mobile data.
Users described the oddity on Facebook, Reddit and X. One Facebook user wrote that they had missed call texts from people who had possibly called the previous week. Another said a text reported a missed call that did not appear in their call log, and the person they rang confirmed they had never called. Some users speculated that Telstra was under cyber attack, but 7NEWS reported the telco moved quickly to dispel suspicions of anything sinister.
The ABC noted that DownDetector showed a spike in reported issues with Telstra on the day.
The incident follows a nationwide Telstra outage on 8 July in which hundreds of Triple Zero calls could not connect, with about 45 per cent of all calls and data connections on the network affected, the ABC reported. 7NEWS reported that a report released in September found two engineers primarily involved in the software upgrade behind that outage were on "mandatory standdown" at the time.