As the government faced questions over telco regulation and the latest massive Telstra outage, opposition leader Angus Taylor found himself answering for a different kind of communications failure: his own, and that of his ministerial team.

Millions of phone connections went dark for hours on Wednesday. Trains stopped, Eftpos went blank, hundreds of triple zero calls failed, and welfare checks were urgently conducted. The bulk of the fault lies with Telstra, but there are important questions about whether the critical telecommunications sector is being appropriately regulated and whether the government has learned from last year's devastating Optus outage. Meanwhile, Taylor seems determined to score own goals rather than pressure the government.