The Telstra outage is a stark reminder of the widespread effects of single system failures

The network disruption – which brought trains, traffic lights and Eftpos payments to a halt – raises questions about the resilience of services

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Wednesday’s national Telstra mobile outage serves as another stark reminder of how reliant on connectivity Australia now is, and how single points of failure can have widespread consequences across the country.

The nearly five-hour outage – which brought train lines to a halt, affected traffic lights, stopped Eftpos payments and even people being able to charge their electric vehicles – was caused by what Telstra chief financial officer Michael Ackland said was time-keeping servers that feed out up-to-date information to the rest of the network.
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