Telstra has admitted it knew of the dangers of a failure of its time systems and is now investigating why backup measures failed to stop this week’s outage, as its chief executive says she’s “deeply sorry” about its impacts.
South Australian police have ruled out a link between a death and the outage, while the communications minister said it was “time for Telstra to face the music”.
Telstra’s chief executive, Vicki Brady, cut short an overseas holiday to address the public for the first time about Wednesday morning’s national outage, which brought down its mobile network, along with Eftpos services, rail services and other services that rely on it for nearly five hours.
Brady apologised for letting customers and the Australian public down.
“I … understand the broader impact on the community when services go down, from things like payments to transport,” she said on Friday.
“It’s extremely frustrating and disruptive when services aren’t available, and I am sorry for the impact that this has had on so many people.”
Wednesday’s outage was caused by a software fault with Telstra’s time-telling systems, which then told the rest of its network that it was November 2006. This lead to what one expert said would be a “digital domino chain fall” that brought the network down in minutes in the early hours of Wednesday morning.
The ABC reported on Friday Telstra was warned by the government’s Cyber and Infrastructure Security Centre of the critical nature of its time-keeping services on keeping infrastructure operational.
Brady said work was being carried out on a time-keeping node when it reset, and it didn’t have the correct time when it restarted.
She said timing systems were “very well-known” and “critical” in mobile networks, but could not say why backup systems did not prevent the outage.
“Our network is built with a lot of redundancy put in place, and that will be part of this investigation,” she said.
Sign up for the Breaking News Australia emailThe communications minister, Anika Wells, said on Friday that as the issue had been resolve, it was now “time for Telstra to face the music”.
“Telstra has a lot of questions to answer,” she said. “We need to get the bottom of what happened. We need to understand how to prevent it happening again.”
The Australian Communications and Media Authority (Acma) will conduct an investigation into the outage, and the telco can face civil penalties of up to $30m if found to be in breach of its legal and regulatory obligations under powers boosted after the Optus 2025 triple zero outage.
Telstra is not the first company to encounter this issue. A telco in Jersey suffered a similar outage in 2020 that lasted hours, took out emergency call functions for some customers on the Channel island, and took nearly five days to fully recover services.
According to the investigation from that outage, the telco’s time server generated the wrong date – November 2000 – nearly 20 years earlier. The incorrect date was passed on to routers in the network that then isolated themselves from the network.
“Having lost around half of the network, inherent resilience was lost which ultimately led to the outage across the entire JT network,” a report found.
The significance of the date was that the system used a week counter up to 1,023 weeks, and the default date went back 19.6 years – as with the Telstra issue.
SA police rules out link to death
South Australia police completed an investigation into a death reported by Liberal senator Kerrynne Liddle, ruling out a link to Wednesday’s triple zero outage.
SA police commissioner, Grant Stevens, said it was “incorrect” to report the link between the death and the outage.
He said the woman’s partner called a neighbour using his Telstra mobile phone, and the neighbour subsequently was able to contact triple zero for an ambulance.
“Both of those calls went through without any difficulty. The woman was then conveyed to a local hospital where she later passed away,” he said on Friday.
Stevens said there were no issues in getting through to triple zero and the incident “has put an unnecessary strain” on the family.
“This is a tragedy where a family has lost a loved one, and in the ordinary course of events, they would not have had such significant involvement with the South Australia police and ... this particular person’s passing would not have been the subject of such significant scrutiny.”
Telstra’s chief financial officer, Michael Ackland, said on Friday the company was assisting authorities with the investigation and “whether there is any connection to Wednesday’s outage”, but suggested there was no record of a failed call from a Telstra phone.
“We’ve also confirmed there were no active outages affecting the local area at the time. And our records show good mobile signal strength at that location.”
Wells told reporters it was “really disappointing” how the opposition had “played politics” with her portfolio this week, referring to claims over the source of the outage, and shadow minister Sarah Henderson admitting to calling triple zero to test it.
