Telstra Engineers Sent Home Before National Outage

An extensive investigation into a July national mobile outage found that the two Telstra engineers most knowledgeable about the critical system were on mandatory rest when it failed. This outage significantly impacted emergency Triple Zero calls, train operations in Victoria and NSW, and eftpos systems nationwide. The failure originated from an undocumented design change made in October of the previous year and a missed software update on a GPS card within the network timing system.

Telstra CEO Vicki Brady accepted all findings, acknowledging the network timing system's priority was insufficient. She revealed eight missed Triple Zero calls during the outage, attributing this to processing and monitoring faults, which have since been rectified. The company has revised the outage's start time to 2:50 AM on July 8, nearly 50 minutes earlier than initially reported. Over 30,000 customers have sought compensation, with Telstra issuing nearly $1 million in credits.

Despite auditors noting budget constraints for the responsible team, Brady rejected claims of underinvestment, emphasizing prioritization as the core issue. She stated that the incident was not due to a lack of resources but a systemic prioritization failure. The board has reduced her pay by over $600,000, with a further nearly $2 million cut from her senior leadership team.