At a two-and-a-half-hour Senate grilling on Friday, Telstra executives revealed just how bad their catastrophic outage earlier this month was. At its peak, it affected about 45% of calls and data across the telco giant’s national network.

The root cause was a failed software update of a piece of hardware – specifically, a server, manufactured in 2011 and worth roughly $30,000, that helps keep accurate time across the network.

Telstra noticed some issues with the time server in October last year. It had received warnings from the manufacturer of the server in 2022 and again in January this year. The telco did not act on these warnings. Under repeated questioning, Gerard Tracy, Telstra’s executive for end-to-end resilience, conceded that replacing the server could have avoided the outage.

But Telstra isn’t alone in its neglect of key physical infrastructure that underpins its systems. In fact, this problem is widespread across many industries. And this outage serves as a major wake-up call.

Telstra forgot the time

Fundamentally, Telstra forgot the time. Digital devices tell the time thanks to systems known as time servers, which prevent clocks from drifting out of alignment. To maintain accuracy, these servers rely on signals from GPS satellites.

However, GPS satellites don’t broadcast the date as we read it. Rather, they broadcast the number of........

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