Telstra’s hardware failure is a wake‑up call for other businesses

In a two and a half hour Senate grill On Friday, Telstra executives revealed just how bad the catastrophic outages earlier this month were. At its peak, it affected about 45% of calls and data on the telecommunications giant’s national network.

The main reason is one failed software update A piece of hardware (specifically, a server) manufactured in 2011 and worth about $30,000 that helps keep accurate time across the network.

Telstra noticed some issues with its time server in October last year.