Report finds Telstra engineers ordered home before network crashed
Releasing a detailed report on the causes of the July 8 failure, Telstra chief executive Vicki Brady said the company would learn from the findings to ensure the mistakes were not repeated.
Two Telstra engineers were ordered to cease working on the night of one of the worst mobile outages in the phone company’s recent history.
An independent investigation into the July 8 failure concluded that Telstra did not have enough engineers or expertise for a crucial part of the network, contributing to a software glitch early in the morning that told the network it was operating in 2006.
“There are too few engineering staff and insufficient expertise supporting the NTP platforms,” the report by consulting firm Technology Audit Partners said. “On the night of the Outage the two primary NTP engineers who were involved in the planned change on the chassis were on mandatory standdown by the time the impact of that change became known.”
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By continuing you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy.NTP stands for network time protocol, a system for ensuring the exact time is shared across a mobile phone network. Without accurate timing, computer servers cannot connect phone calls, including to Triple Zero, or provide access to the internet.
“It was an outage that should not have happened,” chief executive Vicki Brady said. “We let our customers down and we fell short of what Australians rightly expect from us.”
More to come...
