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Andrew Cullen, Senior Research Fellow, School of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne

A cheap 25-year-old piece of hardware broke Telstra. It’s a wake-up call for other businesses

At a two-and-a-half-hour Senate grilling on Friday, Telstra executives revealed just how bad their catastrophic outage earlier this month was. At its peak, it affected about 45% of calls and data across the telco giant’s national network.

The root cause was a failed software update of a piece of hardware – specifically, a server, manufactured in 2011 and worth roughly $30,000, that helps keep accurate time across the network.

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