Failure to replace a 20-year-old server worth $30,000 could cost Telstra $30 million in fines, with executives set to face a Senate inquiry this week as the repercussions of last week’s outage – which blocked Triple Zero calls and disrupted payment and train services – continue to pile up.
Last Wednesday’s outage – which left Telstra mobile customers scrambling after an error with a time synchronisation server prevented mobiles, payment terminals, and other devices from connecting to the network for much of the day – continued after a secondary issue was diagnosed.
By the time Telstra this week advised that the secondary issue had been resolved, it had conducted SMS and phone welfare checks for 639 Triple Zero callers who were unable to connect during the outage – with 170 callers referred to police and seven to emergency services organisations.
South Australian police have confirmed that the outage was not, as had been reported by some, linked to the death of a woman whose partner’s Triple Zero call was blocked during the outage; a medically trained neighbour was brought in to assess her and successfully called Triple Zero.
Coming on the heels of government and regulators’ efforts to improve the resilience of Triple Zero services, the latest outage has been a lightning rod for criticism – with Greens communications spokesperson Senator Sarah Hanson-Young promising to legislate telco reliability standards.
“There is currently no legal requirement for Telstra, or any other telecommunications supplier, to provide a reliable mobile phone system,” she said, pushing for change and adding that “this cannot be left to [industry regulator] ACMA to manage; ACMA has become a lapdog, not a watchdog.”
The outage has been pinned on an obsolete Symmetricom SyncServer S300 node, which manages time on the network but resets its 10-bit week counter to zero every 1024 weeks (just under 20 years) in a common and well understood GPS rollover bug that caused the device to reset to 2006.
The SyncServer S300 was discontinued in 2016 and can be replaced for under $30,000 – but the oversight could, Education Minister Jason Clare confirmed over the weekend, see Telstra fined up to $30 million under new and tougher legislation precipitated by the major Optus outage last year.
“Like all Australians, I did not want or expect to be dealing with another mass outage so soon after the Optus incident,” Minister for Communications Anika Wells said in a press conference in which she said, “It is time for Telstra to face the music… Telstra has a lot of questions to answer.”
A catalyst for domestic roaming at last?
Days before the Telstra outage, new ACCAN research suggested 8 per cent of consumers had issues contacting Triple Zero due to a mobile outage during the previous 12 months, with 43 per cent concerned about Triple Zero’s reliability – 73 per cent unaware of existing ‘camp-on’ arrangements.
While Telstra has confirmed that those mandatory arrangements successfully rerouted many Triple Zero calls to other mobile networks during the outage, critics note that many mobile customers would be unaware that it can take up to 60 seconds for the transfer to occur.
The mass disruption caused by the outage has renewed calls for regulators to mandate more general domestic roaming capabilities – which, as international roaming already does overseas, would automatically reroute calls to another Australian mobile network during a network outage.
Telstra CEO Vicki Brady admitted Telstra knew about the time server bug. Photo: Supplied
Proposals to this effect have been bandied about for years, and were most recently looked at – and dismissed – by the ACCC in 2017, but ACCAN, which this week released a new Mandatory Domestic Mobile Roaming Position Paper, believes it’s time for another look.
“International tourists that come to Australia don’t have this problem because they can actually mobile roam, whereas Australians can’t often do that,” ACCAN CEO Carol Bennett said, citing the paper’s finding that 73 per cent of respondents think this is a no-brainer”.
The ACCC’s 2017 investigation surfaced concerns that such an arrangement could be a disincentive to further network investment, but “when I contacted them [recently], they acknowledge that things have changed significantly compared with 10 years ago,” Bennett told the ABC.
Those changes include a spectrum sharing arrangement between Optus and TPG, tests of emergency roaming and the widespread availability of emergency satellite texting – soon to be expanded to phone calls – through roaming arrangements with the Starlink satellite constellation.
Carriers have expressed concern that the sudden offloading of large numbers of customers could crash the failover mobile network, while Telstra has said its latest outage would not have triggered such mass roaming because its network was still technically working despite the connection issues.
Yet “if it’s a planned outage and there’s another provider available,” Bennett said, consumers would benefit by “putting provisions in place to allow those customers to still access a network that’s available.”
Telstra to face the music
With the outage reportedly contained and Triple Zero functioning normally again, Telstra has quickly shifted to damage control mode, amidst speculation about the future of CEO Vicki Brady’s future, particularly after she admitted the time server bug was known about but had been ignored.
Hanson-Young will get a chance to grill Telstra in detail on Friday, when executives will front up to a Senate Environment and Communications References Committee hearing to explain how the outage happened and what can be done to prevent it happening again.
Just how much the outage affects Telstra’s long-term custom remains to be seen, although the TIO previously noted dramatic surges in complaints after last year’s Optus outage – a second major blow, after its 2023 data breach, that has kept Australians’ trust in Optus at abysmal lows.
Optus continued its rein as Australia’s least trusted company in Roy Morgan’s latest quarterly survey, in which Telstra ranked eighth – but time will tell whether this latest outage will see the company finally challenge Optus for the wooden spoon.
“Telstra is an iconic company [with] a rich history,” Wells said, “but that trust really stands in peril today.”
“It is going to take Telstra a lot of time and a lot of work to rebuild that trust with Australians.”
An update from Telstra CFO Michael Ackland has invited consumers and businesses that experienced financial loss from the outage to submit claims for compensation, which will be considered on a case-by-case basis.
