When the network is down, do your payments flow?

If you run a venue, there's a good chance you felt this week's Telstra outage first-hand. It hit mobile networks, EFTPOS terminals, and even parts of the transport network across the country. For hospitality operators, the pain point was obvious and immediate: payment terminals going down mid-service, with no clear way to take a card.

The full picture is still emerging, and Telstra hasn't described this as a widespread issue - it appears to have hit a large number of customers, but not everyone.

Still, if your POS or Payments Terminal relies on Telstra 4G as its only way of connecting to the network, this is exactly the kind of event that should prompt a hard look at your setup.

What actually happens when the network drops

If your POS depends on Telstra 4G and the connection fails, your POS will automatically switch to standalone/offline mode. Your router keeps creating a network regardless of whether there's an internet connection, so devices on-site stay connected to each other even while the outside world is cut off. Orders keep flowing internally, and once Telstra comes back online, the POS reconnects and syncs everything to the back end automatically. That part looks after itself.

The bigger headache is the payment terminal. If it stops connecting, the fix is usually simple: reboot it. For Tyro terminals, hold the yellow "Corr" key until "Reboot Now" appears, release it, and let the reboot finish - it takes one to two minutes. If that doesn't work, a full power cycle (off, then on) is the next step. After rebooting, run a small test transaction to confirm you're back online.

If you still can't get a connection after that, don't let it stall service. Switch to taking cash or custom payments on the POS to capture the transaction, and retest the terminal hourly until it reconnects.

If the terminal stays down: use custom payments

If the terminal still won't reconnect after rebooting, don't wait. Switch to custom payments on the POS to keep transactions flowing. Custom payments are payment method labels you define—cheque, store credit, offline card, or whatever suits your venue. When your card terminal is offline, staff select the custom method at checkout, complete the sale, and the transaction logs locally. Once your terminal comes back online, you can retest and process any pending card transactions or reconcile the custom payments against your settlement records.

To set up a custom payment method now (before you need it), go to Settings > Payment Methods, click New Payment Method, enter a name, and sync. Your team will already know where to find it when service pressure is high.

The real fix: don't rely on one network

This week is a useful moment to check how protected your business actually is against the next outage, because there's a much better long-term setup than hoping the mobile network stays up.

First, check whether your terminal has dual SIM. If your Tyro Pro terminal was shipped after January 2025, it already runs dual SIM - you can have both Telstra and Optus set-up - if one network drops, it can switch to the other.

Second, and this matters regardless of when your terminal was installed: Wi-Fi should be your default connection, not mobile. Wi-Fi generally gives the most reliable connection and the least reliance on mobile networks in the first place.

If your terminal is currently set to Telstra or Optus as its default, there's no automatic fallback to Wi-Fi - that needs to be configured. Done right, the terminal defaults to Wi-Fi and automatically fails over to mobile only if Wi-Fi drops. Switching your default connection does require reaching out to your provider to make the change.

In short

Dual SIM is a strong safety net. Wi-Fi as your primary connection, with mobile as the failover, is best practice - though we know that's not achievable in every venue or location. Either way, this outage is worth acting on rather than waiting out.

This is exactly the kind of fragility operators shouldn't have to manage alone.

A payment terminal that goes down is lost revenue and a worse guest experience, both entirely avoidable with the right setup.

If you're not sure how your terminals are currently configured, or want to build in redundancy before the next outage hits, get in touch - we'll check your setup and manage any changes with you so you keep taking payments no matter what the networks are doing.