{"id":"camfeed-125","numeric_id":125,"short_title":"","seo_title":"","social_title":"","headline":"","teaser_title":"","titles_source_url":"","titles_fetched_at":"","title":"260710 ABC News Channel 9AM — Telstra Outage","canonical_url":"https://clip.cameronwilson.com.au/s/YVEfbu8ODimJ8AM969G1pg","published_at":"2026-07-09T23:02:11+00:00","source":"CamClip","source_type":"camclip","type":"video clip","content_role":"appearance","author":"Cam Wilson","summary":"","text":"","has_full_text":false,"mcp_visible":true,"mcp_full_text_allowed":true,"full_text_word_count":0,"full_text_status":"","full_text_source_url":"","full_text_fetched_at":"","has_transcript":true,"transcript_status":"done","transcript_kind":"readable","transcript_char_count":5096,"topics":["AI","technology policy"],"quoted_author":"","quoted_url":"","quoted_text":"","citation":"Cameron Wilson, \"260710 ABC News Channel 9AM — Telstra Outage\", CamClip, 2026-07-10, https://clip.cameronwilson.com.au/s/YVEfbu8ODimJ8AM969G1pg","citation_markdown":"Cameron Wilson, [260710 ABC News Channel 9AM — Telstra Outage](https://clip.cameronwilson.com.au/s/YVEfbu8ODimJ8AM969G1pg) — CamClip — 2026-07-10","attribution":"Source: CamClip. Link to canonical URL: https://clip.cameronwilson.com.au/s/YVEfbu8ODimJ8AM969G1pg","transcript":"[0.08s] Speaker 2: Meanwhile, Telstra is being questioned as to why it wasn’t prepared for the issue blamed for the network outage after the ABC revealed the federal government's critical infrastructure agency had repeatedly warned telco providers of the potential vulnerability.\n\n[16.08s] Speaker 2: A national AI reporter Cameron Wilson broke this story, and he joins me now with more.\n\n[21.52s] Speaker 2: Hi there, Ken.\n\n[22.32s] Speaker 2: So just take us through what we know about this error.\n\n[26.08s] Cam Wilson: So we still don’t know everything, but Telstra has been giving us more information in the days since the outage earlier this week.\n\n[32.96s] CamWilson: They've pointed to a software error that happened as a result of an update and have linked it to their GPS system that is used as part of the timekeeping across the network.\n\n[49.52s] Cam Wilson: But another important but less known function of GPS satellites is also telling very accurately computer systems what time it is.\n\n[57.6s] CamWilson: And timing is a very important kind of system that’s needed across a whole array of very important critical infrastructure, including uh telecommunication networks.\n\n[69.12s] Cam Wilson: The role that it fills is that things from as simple as cell towers need to talk to each other, they need to know when to talk, when to listen, and also to matters of security and authorization.\n\n[81.36s] CamWilson: So, for example, if I'm a cell tower and I get a message from someone but I don’t know who it is, I’m told it’s another cell tower.\n\n[88.24s] Cam Wilson: Um, one of the ways I do that is by looking at their security certificate.\n\n[92.16s] CamWilson: And those security certificates rely on uh the time they often have a time and date expiration.\n\n[99.36s] CamWilson: Uh so what we're told happened and what has also been reported is that all of a sudden Telstra’s GPS timekeeping system believed that it was not 2026 but 2006, and that created errors that cascaded across the network to cause the outage, but of course, then cause these issues across the country.\n\n[118.16s] Speaker 2: And so, what were the warnings that Telstra received?\n\n[121.88s] CamWilson: So timing is one of those things that has been coming, has been raised repeatedly by agencies who are looking at Australia’s critical infrastructure and also by experts who've been studying it.\n\n[134.76s] Cam Wilson: The Australia’s Critical Infrastructure Security Agency had repeatedly warned critical infrastructure providers, especially telecommunication providers publicly over the last few years that timing was something that they needed to make sure that they were not vulnerable to.\n\n[149.96s] CamWilson: They identified it as a potential area that needed to have resilience.\n\n[154.76s] Cam Wilson: And so broadly they said, you know, they were looking in particular at these satellite based systems, but also, you know, there are other options for timing.\n\n[162.92s] CamWilson: You can have backup systems like atomic clocks.\n\n[165.56s] Cam Wilson: Telstra did say that it has a backup system, but that was not able to prevent the error.\n\n[170.44s] CamWilson: Um the question of the timing system and preparing for an outright failure is something that can be tested for.\n\n[187.96s] Cam Wilson: Of course, it is a very important part of these systems.\n\n[199.24s] Cam Wilson: The experts I spoke to spoke about having a variety of ways to prepare for errors like this, whether it is having the backups, doing more testing of what happens uh when something goes wrong to your major provider if it is the satellite provider, and also just generally running drills and even potentially in Australia, having something like the UK just launched, a national timing centre that would not only provide a source of timing for Australian companies and infrastructure, but would also kind of be responsible for keeping in touch and coordinating across sectors in you know preparing for these kinds of failures.\n\n[214.92s] CamWilson: The federal government late last year did create a new legal obligation for telecommunication providers to have a risk management plan for all kinds of errors, and one of the specific errors that wasn’t included in this was a failure to these satellite systems.\n\n[219.24s] Cam Wilson: So we know that they were tasked with doing it.\n\n[229.76s] CamWilson: The Department of Home Affairs confirmed to the ABC that they had received that plan from Telstra.\n\n[239.24s] CamWilson: We don’t know what's in it.\n\n[241.92s] Cam Wilson: Obviously, you don’t want to just go handing out a document with all of your potential errors.\n\n[247.88s] Cam Wilson: That seems like something that's probably not good to have out there under the public.\n\n[248.96s] CamWilson: Um so I guess that will be one of the areas of inquiry going forward.\n\n[250.12s] Cam Wilson: How did they prepare for this if they identified it as a risk?\n\n[253.76s] Speaker 2: Okay, National AI and Technology Reporter CameronWilson there with those details.\n\n[254.84s] Speaker 2: Thank\n\n[255.00s] Cam Wilson: you. Thank you.","transcript_note":"AI-cleaned readable transcript. Check the linked recording before using verbatim quotations."}