Telstra outage causes havoc on local construction sites

THE Telstra outage, across wide parts of Victoria on Wednesday morning, July 8 has played havoc with local building sites.

The outage which started at 4.30am had largely been restored by 10am.

But it couldn’t have come at a worse time for tradies trying to start their workday or coffee shops trying to turn out the morning brew.

Unable to confirm early morning concrete pours and the arrival of materials, construction crews from Cowes to Leongatha have been left waiting for scheduled work to begin.

“You couldn’t order concrete and they couldn’t contact you to confirm or say it was coming,” said one local tradesman.

“In another case, a concrete pump operator who was running late couldn’t call the works site to let them know.

“It would have caused havoc waiting for material to arrive.

“People use Telstra because of reliability, now this,” he said.

The biggest problem across regional Victoria involved the cancelation of regional trains due to signaling issues.

It prompted a spokesperson for Rural Councils Victoria to hit out at Telstra, claiming regional areas once again bore the brunt.

“Once again, people living in country Victoria are left stranded because of a system outage,” said the RCV spokesman.

“V/Line trains are not running today, and there are only limited bus replacement services. And this is on top of generally poor public transport alternatives in country areas every other day.

“So, good luck if you have a medical appointment in Melbourne. Or a business meeting in Geelong. Or a uni lecture in Bendigo.

“Nobody can predict exactly when a system will go down, but we can prepare for it. For a variety of reasons, it happens all the time.

“It's simply not good enough that country Victoria is expected to grind to a halt with such regularity.”

Fronting the media shortly afte1 10am, Telstra CFO Michael Ackland, claimed it was an intermittent problem.

He said the problem originated within a number of nodes responsible for keeping time across the telco’s network.

“So, the issue is impacting a number of nodes within our network that keep time across the mobile network, and when these nodes are not operating as expected, which is what has occurred, other parts of the network can be affected, resulting in intermittent issues with some mobile calls and data sessions,” he said.

When these timing nodes were affected, it created a domino effect and set off disruptions for some mobile voice calls and services.

The latest from Telstra, posted at 9.45am was as follows:

“We’ve made good progress restoring this morning's issue affecting some mobile services, with just under 90% of calls and data now flowing successfully across the network.

“Our teams are working as quickly as possible to restore remaining services and get all customers back online.

“We know how much you rely on our network and understand just how much of a disruption this has been to your day.

“For that, we're sorry. We'll continue to update you here until everything is resolved

“We're looking into an issue affecting some mobile calls and data connections. If you're having trouble connecting at first, try again as it may work on a retry. We're on it and will share an update as soon as it's fixed. Thanks for bearing with us.”

Kids being dropped off at grandparents for holiday childminding, calls between work colleagues, staff trying to log on to get their workday underway and coffee from your favourite barista; it was all thrown into chaos on Wednesday morning.

But the impact was mixed.

At Café Biscotti in Cowes, staff put a work-around in place to circumvent their Telstra payment system, linking instead to a private mobile phone using the Vodaphone network.

Something similar at the Coffee Collective in Wonthaggi where they used a back-up system for EFTPOS transactions to get customers through and on their way clutching the morning heart-starter.

Coles at Cowes was unaffected.

And a staff member at the Phillip Island Community Hospital said they were largely unaffected by the outage.

So, how did it impact you and your business?