A cheap 25-year-old piece of hardware broke Telstra. It’s a wake-up call for other businesses
A major network outage at Telstra was traced back to a failure in an aging time server that the company had been warned to replace. The incident serves as a warning to businesses regarding the risks of neglecting legacy physical infrastructure.
Why it matters
It underscores the critical importance of maintaining foundational IT infrastructure to prevent large-scale service disruptions.
Dean Sewell/AAP A cheap 25‑year‑old piece of hardware broke Telstra. It’s a wake‑up call for other businesses Published: July 19, 2026 10:09pm EDT https://theconversation.com/a-cheap-25-year-old-piece-of-hardware-broke-telstra-its-a-wake-up-call-for-other-businesses-287781 https://theconversation.com/a-cheap-25-year-old-piece-of-hardware-broke-telstra-its-a-wake-up-call-for-other-businesses-287781 Link copied Share article Share article
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At a two-and-a-half-hour Senate grilling on Friday, Telstra executives revealed just how bad their catastrophic outage earlier this month was. At its peak, it affected about 45% of calls and data across the telco giant’s national network.
The root cause was a failed software update of a piece of hardware – specifically, a server, manufactured in 2011 and worth roughly $30,000, that helps keep accurate time across the network.
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