The fear of many Australian to be disconnected happened on Thursday when outage hit the three telecommunication companies, cutting Aussies off from their mobile phones.

The outage affected users of Optus, Vodafone and Telstra, but Vodafone said the incident appeared to be unrelated. Vodafone said that in its case, there was a failed transmission link in Western Australia, while Optus is not yet sure what caused its outage, reports ITWire.

In its Facebook page, Vodafone told subscribers that it is working to address the problem as soon as possible and promised updates. It said the telco's engineers are working double time to restore the service and apologised for the incident.

Optus advised customer through a tweet to turn their phone off and on to fix the problem.

Telstra suffered a hardware failure that affected thousands of its clients in Melbourne. It deployed a technician to the company's Windsor Exchange to replace a faulty hardware, and service has been restored.

The outages coincided also with the timeout suffered by Facebook globally, which lasted for about 30 minutes, but has been fixed.

The outages occurred when many Australians were monitoring the results of the ongoing World Cup games in Brazil on their smartphones.

YouTube/ANC News 24