{"id":"camfeed-7","numeric_id":7,"short_title":"Telstra's national outage","seo_title":"Telstra recently warned about timing issue linked to national outage - ABC News","social_title":"Government, experts repeatedly warned of issue that caused Telstra outage","headline":"Telstra recently warned about timing issue linked to national outage","teaser_title":"Government, experts repeatedly warned of issue that caused Telstra outage","titles_source_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-10/telstra-warned-about-vulnerability-before-national-outage/106896906","titles_fetched_at":"2026-09-05T04:20:02+00:00","title":"Government, experts repeatedly warned of issue that caused Telstra outage","canonical_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-10/telstra-warned-about-vulnerability-before-national-outage/106896906","published_at":"2026-07-09T18:59:14+00:00","source":"ABC News","source_type":"abc","type":"news article","content_role":"primary","author":"Cameron Wilson","summary":"Government agencies and academics both recently warned Telstra it was vulnerable to the type of error that caused this week's national outage.","text":"Government agencies and academics both recently warned Telstra it was vulnerable to the type of error that caused this week's national outage.","has_full_text":true,"mcp_visible":true,"mcp_full_text_allowed":true,"full_text_word_count":1206,"full_text_status":"ok","full_text_source_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-10/telstra-warned-about-vulnerability-before-national-outage/106896906","full_text_fetched_at":"2026-09-04T10:49:27+00:00","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":"","transcript_char_count":0,"topics":["technology policy"],"quoted_author":"","quoted_url":"","quoted_text":"","citation":"Cameron Wilson, \"Government, experts repeatedly warned of issue that caused Telstra outage\", ABC News, 2026-07-10, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-10/telstra-warned-about-vulnerability-before-national-outage/106896906","citation_markdown":"Cameron Wilson, [Government, experts repeatedly warned of issue that caused Telstra outage](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-10/telstra-warned-about-vulnerability-before-national-outage/106896906) — ABC News — 2026-07-10","attribution":"Originally published at ABC News. Link to the canonical ABC URL: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-10/telstra-warned-about-vulnerability-before-national-outage/106896906","full_text":"Telstra was warned by federal government agencies and academics for months that it was vulnerable to the type of error that brought Australia's biggest mobile network to its knees this week, the ABC can reveal.\n\nFor years, public alerts by government agencies and submissions from researchers had flagged a scenario affecting telcos that now looks prescient: cascading problems caused by a single point of technical failure connected to timekeeping.\n\nOn Wednesday, that risk was no longer hypothetical.\n\nTelstra identified an issue about 4:30am affecting \"a number of nodes that help keep time across our mobile network\".\n\nBy the time services were mostly restored, the telco ruled out a cyber attack as the source of the disruption and instead pointed to a software fault affecting timekeeping.\n\nWhile timekeeping and the satellite systems on which it predominantly relies are little known to the public, they have repeatedly been identified as major potential points of failure, long before this outage that one expert said was Australia's first national timekeeping-related infrastructure failure.\n\nTelstra was contacted for comment but did not respond by deadline.\n\nWhy telcos need to know the time GPS is best known as the technology that helps people find their way around, but it also serves a lesser-known function: transmitting the time as well as location. Those time signals are used by countless industries to make sure different parts of their systems agree on exactly what time it is. Modern infrastructure depends on separate computers, payment systems, data centres and transport networks agreeing on what happened and when. For telecommunications networks, this is important for functions such as passing calls and data between mobile towers so they reach the right recipient.\n\nTelstra chief financial officer Michael Ackland on Wednesday attributed the outage to a \"time synchronisation issue\" caused by a \"glitch in the software that reset the GPS timer\".\n\nThis morning, chief executive Vicki Brady acknowledged the warnings, saying this type of error was \"well-known\" in the industry.\n\nNeither she nor Mr Ackland would confirm whether Telstra had a back-up timing system or if it had prepared a plan for a systemic error of this nature.\n\n\"Time synchronisation is critical to the way all networks run. And, yes, it clearly has been a vulnerability. But we'll come back on that in our investigation,\" Mr Ackland told a press conference.\n\nSwinburne University professor Allison Kealy, an expert in positioning, navigation and timing, told the ABC she had raised this exact scenario when she approached Telstra earlier this year while seeking support for a proposed critical infrastructure resilience research centre.\n\nProfessor Kealy said the pitch to telcos and other critical infrastructure operators was that they needed to identify shared points of failure before an outage exposed them.\n\n\"We have been approaching all the critical infrastructure sectors to tell them, we have to act now,\" she said.\n\nAustralia's government-run Cyber and Infrastructure Security Centre has also repeatedly raised timekeeping as a major concern for critical infrastructure providers.\n\nIn 2024, it put out a public alert about how \"Australia's critical infrastructure increasingly relies on the delivery of positioning, navigation and timing\".\n\nIn October last year, another alert from the centre singled out \"critical communications assets\" as being dependent on these timekeeping systems, including space-based satellites. It reiterated the legal obligations to ensure providers had backups if those systems failed.\n\n#recirculationrecommendations-106895768\n\nThe alert was published about the same time the federal government created a new legal requirement for critical telecommunications providers to maintain a risk management program covering material hazards and mitigations.\n\nThe government's guidance for complying with this new requirement explicitly mentions preparing for anything that impairs systems that rely \"on satellite and navigational technology\" such as timing.\n\nA spokesperson for the Department of Home Affairs confirmed Telstra had provided it with its risk management program.\n\nCommunications Minister Anika Wells said the government expected the telco to fulfil these requirements.\n\n\"Telstra is captured by critical infrastructure legislation, which means it has to observe higher standards and more rigorous processes when it comes to discharging their duties,\" she told reporters today.\n\nAustralian Communications and Media Authority deputy chair Adam Suckling said the agency's investigation into the outage would consider the timing equipment failure.\n\nExperts outside the government have also been sounding the alarm about Australia's dependence on GPS for almost 20 years.\n\nAs early as 2008, University of Adelaide professor Don Sinnott told a Senate inquiry that GPS was used for precise timing, on which telecommunications, banking and commerce relied to a \"little-appreciated extent\".\n\nIn recent times, jamming has become an almost daily occurrence in the Russia-Ukraine war and has even affected ships around the Strait of Hormuz.\n\nMuch of the academic and public policy work about GPS vulnerability has focused on jamming and spoofing, but experts say the same dependence on satellite signals also creates timing risks when systems fail.\n\nThe first suspected national outage caused by timekeeping issues\n\nProfessor Kealy said Mr Ackland's explanation of what happened raised questions about the resilience of Telstra's timekeeping systems.\n\n\"If a single software fault could disrupt the [timing] architecture across a large portion of their network, then there's a general expectation that they are aware of single points of failure,\" she said.\n\nProfessor Kealy gave the analogy of having both a wall clock and a clock on a microwave in your home. They are independent clocks, but they can still share a common point of failure.\n\nIf one clock broke, the other would likely continue working. But if the house lost power, both might stop keeping time.\n\nAndrew Dempster, a professor with UNSW's Australian Centre for Space Engineering Research, said he could not recall another timing-related failure causing disruption on this scale in Australia.\n\nProfessor Dempster said while the outage appeared to show a failure rather than manipulation of GPS, it still demonstrated how vulnerable GPS-based timing systems could be.\n\n\"People don't understand that it's GPS timing that is the most important thing in terms of how vulnerabilities can make things go wrong in daily life,\" he said.\n\nProfessor Kealy said the outage raised questions about whether Telstra's primary and backup timing systems shared a common point of failure.\n\nPreparing for timing failures\n\nProfessor Kealy said preventing problems like this required multiple sources of time that could be checked against each other before a bad signal or software fault flowed through connected systems.\n\nShe said there was a need for more thorough testing of these systems across sectors and a framework for how critical infrastructure providers should prepare risk mitigation plans.\n\nShe said a national timing centre, like the UK's recently created National Timing Centre program, could fulfil such a function.\n\nProfessor Dempster said Australia should also address the practical barriers to testing GPS resilience, because testing systems against jamming required transmitting into a protected radio band.\n\nAustralia needed to \"establish regimes […] where that testing can be done safely,\" he said.\n\nBut Professor Kealy said the responsibility did not stop with Telstra or other telcos.\n\nOther industries that depend on telecommunications networks also needed to understand how much of their own resilience relied on those networks staying online.\n\n\"One system fails, telecoms fail, and suddenly you see transport failure. Transport failure leads to freight and logistics failures. The list goes on,\" she said.","full_text_attribution":"Full text extracted from the ABC News article at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-10/telstra-warned-about-vulnerability-before-national-outage/106896906. Attribute to ABC News and link to the canonical URL."}