September 2, 2026 — 10:47 am Save You have reached the maximum number of items saved. Remove items from the saved list to add new ones. AAA The only two Telstra engineers with in-depth knowledge of the system, which failed in July, were on mandatory leave when the national mobile blackout they unwittingly caused occurred, an external investigation has found. The glitch cut off hundreds of people from Triple Zero, grounded trains in Victoria and New South Wales and brought down EFTPO systems across the country. It prompted a Senate inquiry and an investigation by the communications regulator, which could see Telstra fined up to $30 million. Telstra will face difficult questions over service disruptions and failure to connect emergency calls to Triple Zero.Eddie Jim The pair replaced a faulty power supply in a timing chassis in Melbourne in the early hours of 8 July. When he reconnected to the network at 2:50 a.m., the internal GPS map rebooted and began telling the mobile network that it was 2006. The card was missing a firmware update due to a predictable issue that the vendor had already flagged in the bulletins, as confirmed by the July report in this header. The Technology Audit Partners report said alarms on sync servers were only checked during business hours by a small number of employees and did not appear in monitoring tools used by 24/7 support teams. When errors started occurring, no one on duty could find records of the servers, the work done overnight, or the people to call. The outages have prompted renewed attention to Australia’s Triple Zero system and the reliability of the nation’s telecommunications networks in general. CEO Vicki Brady said the company accepted all findings. “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 Wednesday. “This is a mistake on our part.” Communications Minister Anika Wells said the report identified preventable disruptions. “This was a failure that should not have happened and it caused extreme disruption across the country,” she said. “Australians rightly expect to achieve Triple Zero when they need it most, and telecommunications companies have a legal obligation to ensure the connection happens.” Brady also said Telstra missed eight failed Triple Zero calls during the outage and never carried out the welfare checks needed to find out whether the people who made them were safe. She blamed it on manual processing error and monitoring error. Checks have already been carried out. One subscriber connected to another network, and the other found another way to connect. Five either did not need help or made a mistake when dialing the number. Police visited the home of an unidentified eighth caller. “This shouldn’t have happened. We should have taken those eight,” Brady said. “We know how important Triple Zero is. Telstra CEO Vicky Brady.AARP These eight are on top of the hundreds of failed Triple Zero calls that Telstra has already reported. The telecommunications company also moved the start of the blackout to 2:50 a.m. on July 8, nearly 50 minutes earlier than announced. Previously, the time at which the maintenance request was closed was displayed, rather than when the fault started. Brady said the failure was “not due to an infrastructure failure” but due to an undocumented design change made last October and a software update that was never applied to the GPS map. Although auditors concluded the team responsible was constrained by budget priorities, Brady rejected suggestions of underinvestment, saying Telstra employs about 2,800 network engineers and has spent more than $19 billion on capital works and spectrum over five years. “Essentially, it came down to the fact that the network synchronization system was not given the priority it needed for critical network capabilities.” Telstra boss Vicky Brady “It’s not a lack of resources. It’s not a lack of money,” she said. “It’s about setting priorities.” The Australian Consumer Communications Action Network said the report showed a management failure rather than a technical fault beyond Telstra’s control and renewed its call for mandatory reliability standards. “We rely on telecommunications companies to ensure that their networks are managed with a level of seriousness commensurate with public safety,” said Chief Executive Carol Bennett. “This report shows that this did not happen. Not because the problem was unforeseen – in fact it was foreseeable – but Telstra did not consider it a priority until it caused power outages across the country.” Bennett said it was “deeply concerning that a profitable business like Telstra does not have the in-house capacity” to maintain such a vital system, and called on the Government to amend legislation before Parliament next week to introduce minimum reliability requirements for the sector. The report also said there was a lack of curiosity among employees who saw warning signs and did not pursue them, a criticism Brady accepted. “This is a lesson we need to learn,” she said. “We must always be willing to challenge the way we operate.” When asked if anyone had lost their job due to the power outage, Brady said it was not the individual’s fault. “Clearly, for us to have such a failure, our processes and our controls were not sufficient,” she said. “This is not about anyone losing their job.” The board has already paid her more than $600,000 in salary, and her senior management team has had to cut just under $2 million. More than 30,000 customers have contacted Telstra for compensation and it has paid out just under $1 million in credits, averaging about $15 for consumers. Brady encouraged anyone who doesn’t already have money to speak out. “Today’s networks are complex, but complexity is no excuse,” she said. The Business Briefing newsletter delivers insightful stories, exclusive content and expert insights. Sign up to receive it every weekday morning.. CLARIFICATION An earlier version of this story stated that two Telstra engineers were sent home on mandatory rest. The update states that they were on a mandatory break. 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 ФБР расследует продажу более 153 миллионов водительских прав – Кребс о безопасности How we make AI coding more cost efficient without sacrificing task quality