Telstra CEO ‘deeply sorry’ for outage and admits risk of time-keeping failure was known

Telstra CEO Vicki Brady speaks in Sydney on Friday, apologising for a national outage that has stopped trains, transactions and some triple zero calls. Photograph: Dean Sewell View image in fullscreen Telstra CEO Vicki Brady speaks in Sydney on Friday, apologising for a national outage that has stopped trains, transactions and some triple zero calls. Photograph: Dean Sewell Telstra CEO ‘deeply sorry’ for outage and admits risk of time-keeping failure was known Vicki Brady grilled at first public appearance since returning from overseas as SA police say call to triple zero failed before death Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates Get our breaking news email , free app or daily news podcast Telstra has admitted it knew of the dangers of a failure of its time systems and is now investigating why backup measures failed to stop this weeks outage, as its chief executive says she’s “deeply sorry” about its impacts. It came as South Australian police said an investigation was under way into whether a death during the outage can be linked to problems in calling triple zero, despite Telstra claiming it has no record of any failed call from family members. Telstra’s chief executive, Vicki Brady, cut short an overseas holiday to address the public for the first time about Wednesday morning’s national outage , which brought down its mobile network, along with Eftpos services, rail services and other services that rely on it for nearly five hours. Telstra’s triple-zero failure is a result of prioritising neoliberal ‘competition’ and reaping none of its benefits | John Quiggin Read more Brady apologised for letting customers and the Australian public down. “I … understand the broader impact on the community when services go down, from things like payments to transport,” she said on Friday. “It’s extremely frustrating and disruptive when services aren’t available, and I am sorry for the impact that this has had on so many people.” Sign up for the Breaking News Australia email Wednesday’s outage was caused by a software fault with Telstra’s time-telling systems, which then told the rest of its network that it was November 2006 . This lead to what one expert said would be a “digital domino chain fall” that brought the network down in minutes in the early hours of Wednesday morning. The ABC reported on Friday Telstra was warned by the government’s Cyber and Infrastructure Security Centre of the critical nature of its time-keeping services on keeping infrastructure operational. Brady said work was being carried out on a time-keeping node when it reset, and it didn’t have the correct time when it restarted. She said timing systems were “very well-known” and “critical” in mobile networks, but could not say why backup systems did not prevent the outage. “Our network is built with a lot of redundancy put in place, and that will be part of this investigation,” she said. Telstra is not the first company to encounter this issue. A telco in Jersey suffered