South West Healthcare's critical incident management team met this morning to work out how best to deal with the situation. 

A full report will be available later this afternoon, but the impact on the Warrnambool Base Hospital appeared minimal at this stage.

However, hospital management urged people to minimise "non-emergency calls" as only one phone line into the hospital was working.

Meanwhile, today's race meeting at Warrnambool racecourse will go ahead as planned thanks to a bit of last-minute re-organising.

Warrnambool racing club chief executive John Green said Optus SIM cards had been purchased this morning and staff members had donated Optus phones for use by the race stewards.

A wireless internet link has brought in to keep Tabcorp running and a satellite dish had been provided to ensure TVN and Sky broadcasts continue as normal, Mr Green said.

He said there may be some minor delays in getting results through to the relevant places, but added it would be a "minor disruption".

"Everyone's been pretty calm - it's just a matter of people doing what they're trained to do.

"I've been in racing for 30 years, and in my time there's been plenty of hiccups," he said, adding that he'd never seen a "hiccup" quite like this.

Looking on the bright side, he said the network outage could have an unexpected spin-off for the racing club.

"I'd suppose we could get a bit of a boost in crowd numbers today - I can't imagine a lot of work will be getting done in Warrnambool."

People at the course would certainly be a plus for bookies at the track, who ordinarily rely on the Telstra network to receive phone bets.

"It's going to be pretty ordinary," bookmaker Roger Wright said.

"There won't be any incoming calls, there won't be any internet on course.

"She's going to be a very slow day."

It is also business as usual at The Standard today.

The managers of the south-west's major daily newspaper said The Standard would be published as normal on Friday despite the chaos inflicted by the Telstra exchange fire.