Telstra has confirmed all services have been restored after mobile customers experienced a mass outage in multiple states, explaining that the issue was caused by an “embarrassing human error”.

Customers earlier reported “no service” and were unable to make calls.

Telstra’s chief operations officer Kate McKenzie said the outage was an “embarrassing human error”.

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She said the major disturbance was caused by a “node malfunction”.

“Normally it would not have been an issue, but because of human error this outage was caused,” she said.

“Ten nodes across the company enable us to be able to manage traffic and connections for voice and data around the whole country.

“Normally we could take down three or four of those nodes but on this occasion the correct procedure was not followed.”

Ms McKenzie said customers would be compensated in some form.

“We do not like causing that level of inconvenience to our customers, and we are working very quickly right now to figure out how we can provide some free data to our customers to make up for the inconvenience,” she said.

The Department of Fire and Emergency Services (DFES) in Western Australia said the SMS and online warning system for people in Myalup fire zone was down due to the outage.

DFES South West Superintendent Ricky Curtis said some of their communications avenues had been compromised.

“Whilst the mobile network is down, the text warning system is not achievable, but landlines however can still receive phone calls under the telephone warning system,” he said.

“The second issue is that the internet access is also compromised, so the ability to get current information from places like the DFES website and others is compromised.”

We’ve identified the issue and services are being restored progressively. Thank you for your patience. Sorry for any inconvenience caused.

— Telstra (@Telstra) February 9, 2016

Telstra users have shared their frustrations on Twitter.

Well that was a scary 8 minutes.. I’ll never forget where I was during the great #Telstra outage of 2016.. — Sunil Daniel (@sgd03) February 9, 2016

How is possible to have a nation wide outage??? Crazy from a ‘Premium’ service such as Telstra. https://t.co/TeEUJaFvmb

— Stephen Bolger (@stephenjbolger) February 9, 2016