Telstra’s July 8 network outage cut millions of people off from communication, disrupted triple zero services and affected public transport, especially in regional areas.
About 1700 people were left stranded at Naarm/Melbourne’s Southern Cross Station and thousands of others faced delays as the outage shut down Victoria’s V/Line regional train services communications network.
In addition to phone and internet services going down, electronic payment systems and other systems that rely on mobile networks were affected.
The outage was reportedly caused by timekeeping systems that Telstra Chief Financial Officer Michael Ackland said are “critical to the way all networks run”. The ABC reported that government agencies and academics had warned Telstra for years that it was vulnerable to this issue, but nothing was done.
The failure of the country’s largest telecommunication company brought to mind the similar 2023 Optus network outage, which affected about 10 million people.
Two-thirds of the population have been directly affected by the two outages in the past three years, highlighting just how vulnerable these systems are. These disruptions go beyond simple inconvenience to have serious economic effects, with costs reaching into the billions.
How then were Telstra and Optus allowed to fail? These vital services should be among our most secure, but they have been consistently undermined by privatisation.
Unions have been critical of Telstra’s job cuts and offshoring, with Communication Workers Union (CWU) president Shane Murphy saying: “This is what happens when you prioritise the bottom line over critical services.”
According to the CWU, Telstra is planning to offshore about 650 domestic jobs, which also risks placing sensitive data overseas. The Optus outage also occurred after 200 job cuts.
Telstra was founded by the Commonwealth in 1901 and privatised by the Paul Keating and John Howard governments in the 1990s, leading to inefficiencies, lower quality service and higher costs for users.
Cost-cutting in a desperate drive for profits is creating weaknesses in vital national infrastructure. As Isaac Nellist wrote in Green Left in 2023: “Re-nationalisation of the telecommunications network must be on the agenda.”
Sarah Hathway, former Geelong City councillor and Socialist Alliance candidate for Lara, said “essential public infrastructure must be publicly owned”. “People not being able to get through to triple zero and regional Victorians being left stranded … unable to get to or from work, study and appointments is not good enough.”
A Senate inquiry chaired by Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young has been established to investigate the outage, as well as an investigation by the Australian Communications and Media Authority.
These inquiries will likely call for stronger regulations and enforcement powers on telecommunications companies, but the continued failure of the private sector to deliver an essential service makes it clear that Labor must take urgent action.
It’s time to recognise the failures of the privatisations of the 1990s and 2000s and change course to put essential infrastructure back into public hands.
[Dom Williams is standing for the Socialist Alliance in the seat of Bellarine for the Victorian state elections in November. Find out more here.]