Wednesday’s national Telstra mobile outage serves as another stark reminder of how reliant on connectivity Australia now is, and how single points of failure can have widespread consequences across the country.
The nearly five-hour outage – which brought train lines to a halt, affected traffic lights, stopped Eftpos payments and even prevented people being able to charge their electric vehicles – was caused by what Telstra’s chief financial officer, Michael Ackland, said was time-keeping servers that feed up-to-date information to the rest of the network.
