Telstra has responded to reports that its costly network outage earlier this week could have been avoided if it spent less than $30,000 replacing old equipment. Insiders from the telco have told the Sydney Morning Herald that the equipment believed to have caused the meltdown was a device called a SyncServer S300, which is designed to set the time in a network. The cost of replacing the old tech equipment, which stopped being manufactured in 2016, is $22,000.
Telstra Investigation Underway
Telstra said it was still investigating the incident in a statement released to 7NEWS on Saturday afternoon. “We’ve commenced a full investigation into this incident,” a Telstra Spokesperson said. “This will include what happened before, during and after the incident as well as considering what further steps we might take to ensure the reliability and resilience of our network. We want to ensure we have a complete understanding of the facts before drawing conclusions, and we’ll provide further technical details once that investigation is complete.”
Senate Hearing Looms
Bosses from the telco are set to go to Canberra next week for an emergency Senate hearing. The Triple Zero Senate inquiry, launched after last year’s deadly Optus outage, is expected to grill Telstra CEO Vicki Brady and CFO Michael Ackland. The outage affected Telstra’s mobile network and the ability for some customers to contact triple-0. It also saw chaos on public transport networks and prevented small businesses from processing card payments.
