<
https://theconversation.com/a-cheap-15-year-old-piece-of-hardware-broke-telstra-its-a-wake-up-call-for-other-businesses-287781>
"At a two-and-a-half-hour Senate grilling on Friday, Telstra executives
revealed just how bad their catastrophic outage earlier this month was. At its
peak, it affected about 45% of calls and data across the telco giant’s national
network.
The root cause was a failed software update of a piece of hardware –
specifically, a server, manufactured in 2011 and worth roughly $30,000, that
helps keep accurate time across the network.
Telstra noticed some issues with the time server in October last year. It had
received warnings from the manufacturer of the server in 2022 and again in
January this year. The telco did not act on these warnings. Under repeated
questioning, Gerard Tracy, Telstra’s executive for end-to-end resilience,
conceded that replacing the server could have avoided the outage.
But Telstra isn’t alone in its neglect of key physical infrastructure that
underpins its systems. In fact, this problem is widespread across many
industries. And this outage serves as a major wake-up call."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
