Telstra CEO Vicki Brady told a Senate inquiry that last week’s outage at Australia’s largest telecoms firm was likely caused by an undocumented design change and a missed software update on a network time-keeping device.
Outage Details
Last Wednesday’s outage cut phone services for thousands of customers, disrupted wireless payments and halted trains. The issue happened because an intentional design change to the time-keeping device, meant to fix a prior fault, had not been properly documented, leaving the maintenance team unaware of how the equipment would behave when restarted.
A software update had also not been applied to the device. Brady stated that if the software update had been completed or the design change had been properly reviewed and documented, the outage may not have occurred.
Original reporting: Appleton, WI News Feed (HLL/CB) — read the source article.
