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Telstra outage blamed on known bug in obsolete server

Embattled telco faces Senate grilling and $30 million in fines.

By David Braue on Jul 13 2026 10:15 PM

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Last week's Telstra outage has been blamed on an obsolete Symmetricom SyncServer S300 node. Photo: Supplied

Failure to replace a 20-year-old server worth $30,000 could cost Telstra $30 million in fines, with executives set to face a Senate inquiry this week as the repercussions of last week’s outage – which blocked Triple Zero calls and disrupted payment and train services – continue to pile up.

Last Wednesday’s outage – which left Telstra mobile customers scrambling after an error with a time synchronisation server prevented mobiles, payment terminals, and other devices from connecting to the network for much of the day – continued after a secondary issue was diagnosed.

By the time Telstra this week advised that the secondary issue had been resolved, it had conducted SMS and phone welfare checks for 639 Triple Zero callers who were unable to connect during the outage – with 170 callers referred to police and seven to emergency services organisations.

South Australian police have confirmed that the outage was not, as had been reported by some, linked to the death of a woman whose partner’s Triple Zero call was blocked during the outage; a medically trained neighbour was brought in to assess her and successfully called Triple Zero.

Coming on the heels of government and regulators’ efforts to improve the resilience of Triple Zero services, the latest outage has been a lightning rod for criticism – with Greens communications spokesperson Senator Sarah Hanson-Young promising to legislate telco reliability standards.

“There is currently no legal requirement for Telstra, or any other telecommunications supplier, to provide a reliable mobile phone system,” she said, pushing for change and adding that “this cannot be left to [industry regulator] ACMA to manage; ACMA has become a lapdog, not a watchdog.”

The outage has been pinned on an obsolete Symmetricom SyncServer S300 node, which manages time on the network but resets its 10-bit week counter to zero every 1024 weeks (just under 20 years) in a common and well understood GPS rollover bug that caused the device to reset to 2006.

The SyncServer S300 was discontinued in 2016 and can be replaced for under $30,000 – but the oversight could, Education Minister Jason Clare confirmed over the weekend, see Telstra fined up to $30 million under new and tougher legislation precipitated by the major Optus outage last year.

“Like all Australians, I did not want or expect to be dealing with another mass outage so soon after the Optus incident,” Minister for Communications Anika Wells said in a press conference in which she said, “It is time for Telstra to face the music… Telstra has a lot of questions to answer.”

A catalyst for domestic roaming at last?

Days before the Telstra outage, new ACCAN research suggested 8 per cent of consumers had issues contacting Triple Zero due to a mobile outage during the previous 12 months, with 43 per cent concerned about Triple Zero’s reliability – 73 per cent unaware of existing ‘camp-on’ arrangements.

While Telstra has confirmed that those mandatory arrangements successfully rerouted many Triple Zero calls to other mobile networks during the outage, critics note that many mobile customers would be unaware that it can take up to 60 seconds for the transfer to occur.

The mass disruption caused by the outage has renewed calls for regulators to mandate more general domestic roaming capabilities – which, as international roaming already does overseas, would automatically reroute calls to another Australian mobile network during a network outage.

Telstra CEO Vicki Brady admitted Telstra knew about the time server bug. Photo: Supplied

Proposals to this effect have been bandied about for years, and were most recently looked at – and dismissed – by the ACCC in 2017, but ACCAN, which this week released a new...