News summary produced by Claude AI
Telstra appeared before a Senate inquiry Friday to explain a major network outage that occurred earlier in the week, affecting approximately 45% of the telecommunications company’s calls and data sessions. Chief Executive Vicki Brady acknowledged the incident and stated the company had failed to meet customer expectations.
The outage stemmed from a Microchip SSU 2000 network time protocol server in Melbourne that reset to the year 2006 during routine maintenance work on backup power systems. The server had not received a critical software update that the manufacturer had recommended in both 2022 and January of the current year. According to Telstra’s account, the application of this update would likely have prevented the outage. Additionally, the company had made an undocumented design change to the equipment to address an earlier issue, which maintenance personnel were unaware of at the time.
Once the server restarted with the incorrect date, the erroneous time information propagated across Telstra’s network over several hours, causing authentication certificates to become invalid. This prevented customers from authenticating onto the network and accessing voice and data services. Telstra stated the outage was not primarily a result of inadequate redundancy in its network architecture, as two other NTP servers in Sydney and Perth continued operating normally. Rather, the failure resulted from interconnected systems that relied on the time protocol servers as a trust reference accepting the incorrect date information.
During the outage, 58,835 calls to triple zero emergency services connected successfully, though 604 experienced errors. Telstra’s emergency services platform was unaffected as it does not rely on the affected time servers. The company has begun investigations into why the design modification was not properly documented and why the recommended software update was not completed. Brady indicated Telstra would provide compensation to affected customers, primarily through account credits, with approximately $100,000 distributed in the week following the incident.
Senate committee members noted the outage occurred despite the company reporting a 2025 profit increase of 31% and questioned whether network resilience claims were credible given rising outage numbers in 2024 and 2025. Brady acknowledged mobile networks cannot be entirely infallible and emphasized ongoing efforts to mitigate service disruptions.