Deputy Liberal leader Jane Hume has labelled the Telstra outage as a “failure” of both the tech giant and the Albanese government in a barbed swipe at Communications Minister Anika Wells.
It comes after Telstra’s CEO Vicki Brady and Chief Financial Officer Michael Ackland were called to a Senate References Committee on Friday to answer for the major outage.
Telstra admitted to receiving at least two warnings that a critical timekeeping component needed urgent updates, including one in January, before the major outage this month.
While replacing the kit would have cost Telstra $30,000, the federal government has warned the telco could face fines of up to $30 million.
Speaking to Sky News Sunday Agenda, Ms Hume said it was not entirely Telstra’s fault.
“It does sound like Telstra has really missed community expectations here. That outage affected millions of Australians, there were around 600 or so Triple Zero calls that didn’t go through and they should be held accountable for their actions,” she said.
“My concern of course is that there has been a report sitting on the Minister’s desk now for around two years, around the last time we had a failure of our emergency services lines around the Triple Zero lines.
“Nothing seems to have been done.”
Ms Hume said the Communications Minister seemed to speak a lot about accountability but standards were not being delivered.
“Anika Wells seems to talk a big game about accountability, not that she lives that every single day,” Ms Hume said.
“This seems to be a failure, not just of Telstra, but on behalf of government, to keep one of the nation’s most important industries, most important pieces of infrastructure, most important services to account.
“We want to see standards delivered that will make sure that there are service maintenance standards for telecommunications, particularly for mobile services.”
The Deputy Liberal leader said Ms Wells had a record of not living up to her “duty” in multiple portfolios.
“Certainly in every other portfolio, whether it be holding the big tech giants to account or blowing out wait lists on aged care, this minister seems to have failed in her duty,” Ms Hume said.
Internal investigations determined the outage to have been triggered by a software glitch that caused the system to “click back” two decades.
Ahead of the bosses’ appearances, Tesltra provided a written submission to the references committee.
The telco stated a lack of a software update for a key time-keeping system caused the outage chaos.
Maintenance teams were also unaware of a design change that affected how the system would reset, it said.
It confirmed reports the so-called time protocol servers reverted to 2006.