Michael Atkin
speaker
70 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 14 Jul
Michael Atkin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
There's not at this stage.
We know that more than 600 triple zero calls couldn't get through.
Unlike the Optus outage, which was linked to two deaths, there haven't been any so far confirmed to be linked to the Telstra outage.
I think this is one of the most pressing questions.
I think the public sentiment is so strong here that there is pressure on the government to do more.
ACAN, the peak consumer group for the sector, it argues that telecommunications should be recognised as an essential service in law, which would require certain standards around enforceable reliability standards.
In the telco space, it's often internal commitments or voluntary commitments or commitments that are in industry codes, and that's not sufficient.
Annika Wells has been making a number of changes and she points to legislation that's still before the parliament, which would give her powers as minister to mandate certain mobile minimum standards across the country.
But the Greens aren't happy with that and Green Senator Sarah Hansen-Young says...
When Parliament comes back, she will push for stronger reliability standards to be put in place in law.
And there's a view that these telco services, that it should be more heavily regulated.
I would say we don't have a full explanation yet.
Telstra has said that the outage was caused by a software defect in nodes that manage time synchronisation between different technology in its data centres.
The Sydney Morning Herald cited two internal sources with Telstra who talked about faulty software updates causing some of Telstra's timing servers to reset their clocks by 1024 weeks, almost 20 years, which made them think the date was way back in 2006 instead of 2026.
It basically, my understanding is it causes a cascading effect across the network and when the timing doesn't match, it causes this sort of domino effect that results in a failure of the technology.
The Sydney Morning Herald also alleged in its story that the server itself was outdated and had stopped being made in about 2016 and could have been replaced for less than $30,000.
So
If these allegations are true, and Telstra will certainly be asked about this at the Senate inquiry, it leads to very serious questions about what Telstra has been doing, having such an outdated piece of equipment that its entire network was reliant on that caused this cascading effect.
Yeah, she did admit that this broader risk around timing systems has been well known in the industry, but she didn't go into much more detail than that.
This is a very important question here and what the investigations will probe.
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