Telstra CEO ‘deeply sorry’ for outage and admits risk of time-keeping failure was known

Vicki Brady grilled at first public appearance since returning from overseas as SA police say call to triple zero failed before death

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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 weeks outage, as its chief executive says she’s “deeply sorry” about its impacts.

It came as South Australian police said an investigation was under way into whether a death during the outage can be linked to problems in calling triple zero, despite Telstra claiming it has no record of any failed call from family members.

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.

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.

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South Australian police confirmed on Thursday they were investigating a death during the outage, which was first reported by Liberal senator Kerrynne Liddle.

“Our understanding is that there’s a person [who] was conveyed to a regional hospital,” the South Australian police commissioner, Grant Stevens, told radio station FIVEAA on Friday.

“That person’s spouse did try and call … triple zero for an ambulance. That didn’t go through, so they utilised another phone.”

Stevens said police will “prepare a report for the coroner and that will take into account all of the circumstances and it’ll be a matter for the coroner to decide what the implications are”.

But 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.

“To date, we can see no record of calls from those numbers accessing Telstra’s mobile network to call triple zero, and more broadly, no record of any calls from those numbers to the triple zero platform,” he said.

“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.”

He said a related call was made successfully to triple zero from another number.