Australia's Northern Territory lost all internet and phone connections yesterday, thanks to the failure of two separate Telstra circuits.

The ten-hour outage meant that ATM and mobile networks were unavailable, and emergency service lines in some areas like Alice Springs also ceased operating.

Isolated residents were not even able to take solace in a bit of gambling - many of the beloved scratchie and pokie machines were down.

The outage was caused by the failure of two fibre optic cables - one near Kununurra, in Western Australia, and another at Marla, south of Alice Springs, according to reports.

The Top End got its phones back at around 11.30am yesterday. Telstra is investigating what caused such a long failure. ®

Related stories

• Telstra rejects Aussie gov calls for split (15 September 2009)
• Oz gov suggests world's worst copyright protection scheme (14 August 2009)
• Aussie censors implement six degrees of separation policy (7 May 2009)
• Aussies get gov-backed uber-broadband (7 April 2009)
• Aussies backtrack on firewall plans (2 April 2009)
• Wikileaks tells Aus censorship minister to rack off (20 March 2009)
• Secret Aussie blacklist leaked (19 March 2009)
• Aussie firewall blocks Wikileaks (18 March 2009)
• Great Aussie firewall claims first victim (17 March 2009)