Telstra suffered a national network outage lasting up to 12 hours, apparently caused by a software defect – we need more resilient comms infrastructure as risks rise
Telstra, Australia’s Australia’s largest telco suffered a massive outage yesterday that resulted in cancelled train services in the Victoria region and two lines in New South Wales ground to a halt. Thousands of customers were without mobile service, some 80,000 businesses that rely on the Tyro app were affected.
The telco carried out welfare checks on 333 customers who had called emergency services during the outage: six needed immediate help. The police conducted physical welfare checks on 79 people the operator could not reach.
The outage began at 04:30 local time on Wednesday and was fully restored within 12 hours. Telstra acknowledged this had affected “some mobile calls and data services” nationwide, although in places the disruption was intermittent. The cause was apparently a software fault related to time-keeping servers at data centres in Sydney (pictured) and Melbourne.
It will take some time for the full cost and impact of the outage to be calculated. Naturally the Australian Communication and Media Authority will investigate.
This is the third major network outage in Australia in the last three years, the other two were down to Optus, the second largest telco in the country.
An outage last September, resulted in three deaths when some people across more than half the country could not call emergency services for 13 hours. Optus was fined after an outage in 2023 left thousands unable to call emergency services.
Woeful lack of resilience
It seems a foregone conclusion that regardless of the cause, bringing parts of a country to a halt is not acceptable. Telstra’s outage was not the result of a cyber attack, but serves as a warning regarding the network’s – and country’s – resilience. The failure of one network put lives at risk and upended a big slab of the nation’s economy.
And things will only become riskier as networks are become increasingly complex, AI is both a weapon for criminals as well as a potential shield for operators, network automation is increasing, the level of cyberattacks on operators continues to rise and the geopolitics are highly unstable. Read Nokia’s Threat Intelligence Report if you really want to scare yourself.
Niusha Shafiabady, Professor in Computational Intelligence, and Md Akhtaruzzaman, Professor of Finance and Head of Department, Accounting and Finance, both at Australian Catholic University wrote in The Conversation today, “Last month, the Five Eyes cyber security agencies (from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States) put out a joint statement sounding the alarm on the urgent new cyber threats posed by artificial intelligence (AI).
“This week’s outage wasn’t the result of a cyber attack. But it still exposed hidden dependencies across Australia’s economy.
“This incident can teach us a few things. First, it shows how a telecommunications failure can spread rapidly across otherwise separate sectors.
“Sometimes this dependency on mobile networks is inevitable, but we need to examine the scenarios where things could go wrong and come up with a plan for them.
“Governments should examine how we can remove such single points of failure. Essential services should not depend entirely on one carrier or one communications technology.
“We must also protect emergency communications above all else, have them regularly tested, not simply documented.“
