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The Guardian - AU
The Guardian - AU
National
Josh Taylor Technology reporter

How a throwback to 2006 took down Telstra’s national phone network

A woman uses a Telstra payphone in Sydney in the 2000s
Before the smartphone: a woman uses a Telstra payphone in the 2000s. The software error behind Wednesday’s outage was in a part of the system about as old. Photograph: Greg Wood/AFP/Getty Images

John Howard was still the prime minister, the first iPhone was months away, and Facebook had only just become available to the world. When Telstra’s mobile network fell over on Wednesday morning, it was because a software defect was telling the network it was back in November 2006.

Telstra’s chief financial officer, Michael Ackland, initially explained that the software defect hit the company’s GPS node, which tells the organisation’s systems what the most accurate time is to the nanosecond.

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