Telstra outage shows communications network should be publicly owned
Telstra’s July 8 network outage cut millions of people off from communication, disrupted triple zero services and affected public transport, especially in regional areas.
About 1700 people were left stranded at Naarm/Melbourne’s Southern Cross Station and thousands of others faced delays as the outage shut down Victoria’s V/Line regional train services communications network.
In addition to phone and internet services going down, electronic payment systems and other systems that rely on mobile networks were affected.
The outage was reportedly caused by timekeeping systems that Telstra Chief Financial Officer Michael Ackland said are “critical to the way all networks run”. The ABC reported that government agencies and academics had warned Telstra for years that it was vulnerable to this issue, but nothing was done.
The failure of the country’s largest........
