September 6, 2026 — 14:49 Save You have reached the maximum number of items saved. Remove items from the saved list to add new ones. AAA The biggest advances in technology, from artificial intelligence to social media, from major hacks to startups, will be covered in this masthead’s technology editor’s weekly newsletter. David Swan. He also talks about the devices that capture so much of our attention. Register here to get the full newsletter – with more material than published here – before it goes online. Last week Telstra published a review of the major network outage in July. While many commentators have focused on highlighting how CEO Vicky Brady was on holiday when the disaster occurred, or whether China was behind the blackout, the review shows the real issue is Telstra’s attention to systemic risks. Commentators have focused on Vicky Brady’s absence during the blackout – or the coverage of her holiday – but the real problem was Telstra’s failure to see the warning signs.Louise Kennerley But there were warnings of what could lead to Telstra’s mobile network being cut off 11 months before it happened. They were reading an open access journal, partially funded by the federal government, and free to read. I’ve been covering this outage since the morning of 8 July, when a failure in Telstra’s nationwide mobile network caused chaos across the country. And I only found the paper last week. It’s called Failure and Resilience in the Age of Intellectual Property and it was published last August by researchers at the University of Technology Sydney with funding from the federal Department of Communications. Her argument is that modern networks rely on multiple functions, which the authors call sovereign, and that when one of them goes down, everything above it goes down too. Network Time Protocol is one of them. This is what has failed at Telstra. At 2:50 a.m. on July 8, the GPS map in the control room in Melbourne turned on again after replacing the power supply and decided that it was November 2006. All the clocks below followed her. Trains stopped in Victoria and New South Wales, eftpos crashed and hundreds of people who called Triple Zero received nothing. The document did not predict the specific bug plaguing Telstra that we first noticed that day: a meter in old GPS equipment that would expire after 1,024 weeks. This sums it up based on the Optus, Rogers and BT outages: treat these features as mission critical, otherwise one of them will end up crashing you. That’s what Brady (pictured above) actually admitted on Wednesday. “Essentially what this came down to was that the network timing system was not given the priority it needed for critical network capabilities,” she said. “This is a mistake on our part.” Indeed miss. It wasn’t the only red flag that Telstra missed, with scientists and government agencies repeatedly warning the telco that it was vulnerable to timing problems that had caused its network to crash. An independent Telstra report released last week also found that the only two engineers with extensive knowledge of the timing system were on a mandatory break that night. Alarms on these servers were monitored by a handful of people during business hours and did not show up in the tools used by the 24/7 teams. The board of directors stripped Brady of more than $600,000, and although no one lost their jobs, regulators could still fine the company up to $30 million. I’m told there is a desire within the government regulator, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, to “go strong” (according to my source) or at least be perceived as being tough. None of this required a leak: the warning was published in English by an Australian university partially funded by Commonwealth funds. Just needed someone from Telstra to read this and take action. Get news and reviews about technology, gadgets and games at our technology newsletter every Friday. Register here. Save You have reached the maximum number of items saved. Remove items from the saved list to add new ones. David Swan is technology editor of The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald. He was previously technical editor of an Australian newspaper.Connect via X or e-mail. From our partners Post navigation REVIEW: The KiiBOOM Phantom 98 Lite is a cute, customizable, and aesthetically pleasing upgrade to your dream desk. 5 autumn outfits for the office this fall from Next, New Look and F&F