‘We have let our customers and Australians down’: Telstra CEO Vicki Brady
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The news: Telstra CEO Vicki Brady has told Australians the company has “let our customers and Australians down, and for that I am deeply sorry”.
She also said the company understands “what caused the issue” and is currently undertaking an investigation into the actions needed to prevent a similar incident from occurring again.
The context: Brady confirmed that she has “been in contact” with Communications Minister Anika Wells “throughout the incident” and she provided an update to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese this morning. She was overseas with her family during the outage but returned to Sydney this morning.
Telstra CFO Michael Ackland said the broader outage was resolved on Thursday, but the telco continues “to work closely with a small number of our enterprise customers on flow-on impacts to their services, including the Australian Rail Track Corporation”.
A node was set to an incorrect time, creating a synchronisation issue with the network at around 4:20am on Wednesday AEST. This was due to a software glitch after the node was restarted while it was being worked on.
The time synchronisation issue subsequently propagated through the network. Brady said technical staff were working on the incident “within minutes” and she was notified once the issue “hit a certain threshold”.
Whether a death in South Australia on Wednesday is related to the Telstra outage is also being investigated.
Ackland noted that Telstra has conducted a detailed review of network records and services related to the address connected with the reported death. The company “can see that a related call was successfully made to triple zero from another number, which was connected and transferred to the relevant …emergency authority correctly”.
Brady stressed that despite triple-zero outages on the Telstra network, the company “identified those calls very quickly, welfare checks were conducted quickly. So, our backup processes did work, calls did camp on to other mobile networks where they were available”.
Ackland said that customers will be compensated through Telstra’s “normal BAU process, and that’s underway, and customers can reach out through the normal channels”.
What they said: “We understand what caused the issue, and we will complete our investigation into the actions needed to prevent it from happening again, you have my commitment on that,” Brady said.
“Networks are large and complex, and we invest significantly in the resilience of our network. When something goes wrong, we’re committed to taking accountability, getting giving people clear information, and fixing issues as quickly as possible,” she said.
“I want to thank our customers and Australians for their patience as we have worked through this. I also want to thank everyone across Telstra who has worked around the clock to get to the bottom of the issue and address it and support our customers.”
The source: Telstra press conference
