Telstra CEO ‘deeply sorry’ for outage and admits risk of time-keeping failure was known
Summary
Telstra experienced a nationwide outage that lasted nearly five hours due to a software fault in its time-keeping system, which caused the network to think it was 2006. The company apologized and is investigating why backup systems failed to prevent the problem. Meanwhile, South Australian police are looking into whether a death during the outage was linked to emergency call failures.Key Facts
- Telstra's network went down for almost five hours on Wednesday morning because its time system reset to the wrong date (2006).
- The outage affected mobile phone service, payment machines (Eftpos), rail services, and other systems depending on the network.
- Telstra knew about risks related to its time-keeping system before the outage.
- Backup systems designed to stop such failures did not work, and Telstra is investigating why.
- Telstra CEO Vicki Brady apologized and spoke publicly after cutting short her holiday.
- Police in South Australia are investigating if a person's death during the outage was linked to emergency call problems.
- A similar time-related outage happened to another telecom company in Jersey in 2020, which also disrupted emergency calls.
- The error occurs when a system's internal clock resets to a date far in the past, causing network equipment to stop working properly.
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