# 260710 ABC News Channel 12PM — Telstra Outage

Canonical source: https://clip.cameronwilson.com.au/s/J_ibl5KO5DWXPYAiGMEiJA
Publication: CamClip
Published: 2026-07-10T02:06:29+00:00
Content role: appearance

## Transcript

Raw or automatically generated transcript. Check the linked recording before using verbatim quotations.

Well, more now on the alleged warnings that Telstra is supposed to have been given about its system. ABC National AI Technology reporter Cam Wilson has been following that story and is with me in the studio. Cam, you're also at that media conference with Telstra this morning. What did we learn about this supposed error? So we got a bit more information about the error, but what we heard mostly about today was their response to the error. Telstra's CEO and CFO were both out there talking about how they had heard about it very soon after it happened and how their teams had kicked into response very quickly. But despite that, they said this error continued to cascade across the network, ultimately bringing it down. So, you know, this kind of error is a error that they acknowledged was a known risk, or in fact, well known within the industry, is what I think that they said. But we still did not have much information about how it got to this point. And you reported this morning, Cam that Telstra had been warned in the months, even years leading up to the outage about the error. What warnings had Telstra received before this happened? Yeah, so Telstra acknowledged today that they had received these warnings from government agencies and academics. There is a federal government agency that deals with the security of critical infrastructure, which includes things like telecommunications companies. And they had repeatedly publicly warned that there is a potential issue with the timing system as a vulnerability. Now, timing is something that probably, you know, most people haven't thought much about when we think about the satellites that do timing, probably think about them more in relation to the fact that they also do location. These are GPS satellites that tell us where we are, they help us navigate, but they also serve this important function of telling computers very precisely what time it is. That is important for all kinds of infrastructure, including telcos, which need that information so that their cell towers can talk to each other. You know, they need to know like when one cell tower is talking, the other one's listening, and also as part of their security. When a cell tower receives a signal, it has what's known as a security certificate. This is supposed to be the thing that vouches for the fact that what's incoming is from who it says it's from. Those have expiry dates, and unfortunately, we're told this issue affected their conception of what time it was, which meant that you know these security certificates then were no longer working, which caused the issue. So Telstra said we're aware of this issue. Um government agencies had said, you know, you really need to prepare for this, and even academics have been increasingly sounding the alarm about timing systems as a potential point of failure across telcos and other infrastructure. One who spoke to me said that they had personally gone to Telstra this year saying that they believed it was an issue, but obviously, you know, this has still ended up happening. Let's hear from CEO Becky Brady now about the error. This issue of time synchronization in our network, that's when the first issue occurred. That does take time to propagate across a very large network. Our teams, our technical teams, were working on it almost immediately. So they acknowledged this error that they had known about things like this, but it was also very interesting what they were evasive on during the press conference. Um, they wouldn't say specifically that they had a backup system for the timing system. They just said, you know, generically that they had backups and resilience in their system. So it'll be interesting to see if they do give us some more details on that. And the other thing is they wouldn't actually say that in their legally required risk management plan, had they actually identified this type of error as something that could affect them and prepared strategies to be able to respond to that. That's something they have to do. The government actually has that information. I expect that we'll hear more about this because, of course, this critical infrastructure is something that the government has been putting a lot of pressure on. It's put um it's passed new rules recently saying you need to prepare for these kinds of errors and risks and vulnerabilities. This vulnerability has happened. They didn't seem that prepared. So I guess we'll see how what they had said and whether they had lived up to that or they failed to do the things that they promised to do to address this.