Government rounds on Telstra after Triple Zero failure doubles

Telstra has revealed its network outages were far worse than the company first suggested, with more than 600 Triple Zero calls failing and a second emergency call problem stemming from the same cause as the first. The admission that the outage stopped about twice as many emergency calls as first acknowledged ’s largest telecommunications company came as federal data showed there were still 126 people police had not yet confirmed were safe on Thursday afternoon. Telstra chief financial officer Michael Ackland confirmed his boss, Vicki Brady, would not return until Friday morning. He defended the time Telstra took to inform Wells, whose office was told of the outage around 7am on Wednesday. Customer reports suggest it began around 3am, and Telstra has said it became aware by about 4.30am. “We will always communicate with customers first when we see that there is an issue and there are certain thresholds as to … when our obligations are to communicate with everyone,” Ackland said. “As soon as the incident reached that threshold, we communicated within minutes to the minister.” Ackland told a Melbourne press conference that 639 welfare checks had been made since the outage began, with 170 cases passed to police and seven people telling the company they needed help. The Telstra executive confirmed reporting a glitch had reset crucial timing systems to November 2006, causing parts of the network to reject customers’ phones showing the correct time. “There was a glitch in the software that reset the GPS timer,” he said. “It was a software glitch that caused the time to click back.” The second fault emerged on Wednesday night, hours after Telstra had declared its network was operational at about 5.15pm. Ackland said it stemmed from the same software defect but had to be fixed in a different way. The disruption dragged into a second day for commuters. Victoria’s entire regional train network remained suspended through Thursday’s morning peak and some trains in the NSW Hunter and Southern Highlands were also affected, though the nation’s rail began returning to normal throughout the day. One woman, identified only as Lynne, told the ABC on Thursday morning that her 95-year-old mother collapsed at her home in the Hunter region of NSW and could not use her personal wearable alarm to get help because of the outage. “She was pressing her … alarm to get help and without Telstra or without it piggybacking to another provider to carry that emergency through, it could have been life and death for her,” said Lynne, who ultimately found her mother distressed but unharmed.