Fairfax Community Network in Dandenong and Narre Warren police station were among the many businesses that went into a meltdown for an hour or two on June 29 when a glitch in the Telstra network disconnected internet networks. A Telstra spokesman told the Journal that Telstra was investigating the problem but as yet had no answers on the cause.

"A number of Telstra's larger customers in Victoria - including some bank services and government departments - experienced an outage of between

45 minutes and two-and-a-half hours on their data network," he said.

"This may have affected their internet connections, telephones and other data services.

"Around 20,000 ADSL services were also affected."

The spokesman said the outage was caused by a hardware failure about 1.20pm. "Services were restored from around 2.30pm and all services were restored by 3.45pm," he said.

The spokesman said Telstra sincerely apologised to their customers for the inconvenience.

"We can assure them we are continuing to work to understand what happened and why," he said.