The same technology that helps your smartphone know when daylight savings ends set off a ‘digital domino chain’ that locked customers out of the network
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John Howard was still the prime minister, the first iPhone was months away, and Facebook had only just become available to the world. When Telstra’s mobile network fell over on Wednesday morning, it was because a software defect was telling the network it was back in November 2006.
Telstra’s chief financial officer, Michael Ackland, initially explained that the software defect hit the company’s GPS node, which tells the organisation’s systems what the most accurate time is to the nanosecond.