Telstra executive Gerard Tracey has conceded that a $30,000 investment to replace a 15-year-old server could have prevented last week's national outage, which cut hundreds of people from triple zero and disrupted services across the country.
Senate inquiry hears evidence
Speaking at a senate inquiry into triple zero, Tracey, Telstra's executive for end-to-end resilience, said: 'A newer piece of hardware operating in the same design that we intended to, the issue wouldn’t have happened.'
Telstra chief executive Vicki Brady added that the outage could also have been prevented if the company had updated its software or properly documented design changes to the affected server.
Outage impact
The outage on Wednesday last week caused widespread disruption, with hundreds of people unable to reach emergency services via triple zero. The failure 'rippled slowly across the network', according to reports, leaving staff unaware of the mass outage risk.
The incident has raised questions about Telstra's network resilience and maintenance practices, particularly regarding aging infrastructure.
