Telstra outage: Damning report finds staff were on ‘mandatory standdown’ at time of mass system failure

Telstra has addressed another major blunder in its catastrophic nationwide outage in July that left tens of thousands of people without service and many unable to dial Triple Zero.

The service went black about 2am on July 7 with tens of thousands of customers affected across WA and no estimate given of when the service would be restored. The outage also affected the Aldi Mobile, Belong and Boost brands.

West Australians were continuing to report outage issues at 5.30pm, more than 12 hours after the telco’s problem was first realised.

Telstra CEO Vicki Brady in addressing investigation findings on Wednesday revealed a further eight calls to emergency services were missed that weren’t initially subject to a welfare check as per protocol.

“It shouldn’t have happened, we should have picked those eight calls up,” Ms Brady said.

“The required checks have since been completed, and Telstra is not aware of any adverse outcomes for those callers,” she said. Ms Brady accepted the network did not adequately prioritise the network timing system.

“As a result of prioritising it not at that highest level, that had some flow-on impacts, which included the TAP findings identifying in this particular area in the teams looking after this network timing system.