Telstra CEO Vicki Brady has apologised for the national outage on Wednesday and admitted the company was aware of the risks of its time-keeping systems failing. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing The Guardian.
Brady spoke at a press conference in Sydney on Friday, apologising to customers and the Australian public. She said it was "extremely frustrating and disruptive when services aren't available".
The outage was caused by a software fault in Telstra's time-telling systems, which caused the network to believe it was November 2006. This triggered a "digital domino chain fall", bringing down the network within minutes.
Brady said timing systems were "very well-known" and "critical" in mobile networks, but could not explain why backup systems failed. "Our network is built with a lot of redundancy put in place, and that will be part of this investigation," she said.
Communications Minister Anika Wells said it was time for Telstra to "face the music". "Telstra has a lot of questions to answer," she said. "We need to get to the bottom of what happened."
The Australian Communications and Media Authority (Acma) will investigate the outage. Telstra could face civil penalties of up to A$30 million if found in breach of its obligations.
This is not the first such incident. A telco in Jersey suffered a similar outage in 2020, which lasted hours and affected emergency calls. Full recovery took nearly five days.
South Australia police investigated a death reported by Senator Kerrynne Liddle and ruled out any link to Wednesday's triple zero outage. Police Commissioner Grant Stevens said it was "incorrect" to report a link.
He said the woman's partner called a neighbour using his Telstra mobile, and the neighbour was able to contact triple zero. "Both calls went through without difficulty. The woman was taken to hospital but later died," he said.
Stevens said the incident had put "unnecessary strain" on the family. "This is a tragedy where a family has lost a loved one," he added.
Telstra is conducting an internal investigation to determine the cause and prevent recurrence. Brady pledged to "learn from this and take all necessary measures to improve network resilience".