NTP server that traveled back in time caused massive Aussie mobile outage
Telstra skipped a patch, didn’t record changes, had no idea it was an accident waiting to happen
Australian telco Telstra has revealed the cause of the recent incident that caused widespread connectivity problems across its mobile networks, inculding outages to Australia's 000 emergency services line, plus outages to electronic payments services and transport networks.
The carrier explained itself in a submission [PDF] to a Senate inquiry into outages affecting Australia’s emergency services which initially investigated an outage at Telstra's main rival, Optus. The Optus incident is linked to multiple deaths after people could not reach emergency services.
Telstra's submission reveals that the carrier's attempt to address a known resilience problem was the instigating incident.
That problem was a faulty backup power feed in the chassis used to house a network time protocol (NTP) server. A few minutes before midnight on July 7, a Telstra techie started work to replace that...
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