How will Telstra pay for its network meltdown?
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Telstra says it's sorry for letting Australians down after last week's nationwide outage. But how is it going to compensate customers left out of pocket? And what do we know now, a week on, about what went so horribly wrong? Today, National Consumer Affairs reporter Michael Atkin on whether the telco is going to be held to account. I'm Sam Hawley on Gadigal land in Sydney. This is ABC News Daily.
Michael, a week ago, thousands of Australians were taken offline after Telstra went into, well, a bit of a meltdown. It just caused chaos, didn't it?
Yes, chaos is probably the best description. At least tens of thousands of Telstra customers around the country couldn't make or receive calls. They couldn't use mobile data or access some of their SMS services.
Couldn't make any calls, couldn't access any internet.
Using the maps and it just went out all of a sudden, so an SOS only.
There was no V-line train from Geelong. So we had to drive from Queenscliff to Geelong, no train. So then we drove to Wyndhamstown and there was no train from Wyndhamstown either.
It's very bad outage. Like I can't turn on my radio to get a job. I can't turn on my cap charge machine.
Most seriously, it cut hundreds of people off from triple zero. It brought down Victoria's regional passenger train network, while in New South Wales, some regional and intercity trains were delayed and cancelled. Businesses weren't able to take electronic payments, so missed out on huge amounts of money that day. Public transport ticketing was affected, and even some electric vehicle charging stations weren't working. And so it was just this extraordinary cascading effect where the Telstra network melts down and people's lives were badly, badly affected all day.
And amazing, I thought, that some regional trains, they stopped for more than 24 hours. What was going on there?
Yes, authorities say the network interfered with the SIM cards that were used on the trains to communicate with the wider network. And this is particularly important for communication between drivers and other parts of the network, but also sharing information on location and speed and arrival times. So You know, they probably could have run the trains, but it wasn't safe to do so.
And, of course, it even affected the Telstra boss, Vicky Brady, and her staff because initially when they were trying to contact her, she was in Europe on a holiday, they couldn't get hold of her because they were affected by the outage.
Yes, and eventually made contact with her by Microsoft Teams. So, you know, just extraordinary, really. So Vicky Brady was on holidays with her family and she flew back in to face the anger on Friday morning to front the media and face the public outrage over it.
We have let our customers and Australians down. And for that, I am deeply sorry.
She acknowledged the seriousness, particularly of those emergency call failures, and she said that they were committed to this internal investigation into the cause and how they would respond.
We take trust in Triple Zero extremely seriously. We understand what caused the issue and we will complete our investigation into the actions needed to prevent it from happening again. You have my commitment on that.
On Friday, Vicky Brady and other executives will front a Senate inquiry where they'll have to explain what exactly went wrong, how it responded, and why this issue was allowed to occur in the first place.
What happened during last week’s nationwide Telstra outage and who is speaking about it?
But Michael, just give me a deeper idea of the impact of all of this. Now we know Optus went down late last year. Two deaths were linked to that outage because emergency calls were offline for 13 hours.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–4:59
2
What happened during last week’s nationwide Telstra outage and who is speaking about it?
4:59–11:04
3
How many customers and services were affected by the Telstra network meltdown?
11:04–16:27
4
Why did regional trains and emergency Triple Zero calls fail during the outage?
16:27–16:36