Telstra outage: The night a network decided the year was 2006

The opposite is actually the case. If we do not have a common understanding of what “now” is, a lot of things we take for granted will stop working.

This summer, Australia realized this the hard way. Let me take this opportunity to give an example of why time matters to a modern society, what happened in this particular case, and what our key takeaways are.

On 8 July 2026, a large part of the mobile network run by Australia's largest cell phone operator Telstra stopped working with voice calls not getting through or text messages that didn't arrive. There were even calls to Australia's emergency number that did not get through. But the outage affected systems even further apart, such as trains, payment terminals, ticketing systems and EV chargers being disrupted.