Privacy concerns in Telstra outage as fire hit services

Telstra’s power outage triggered SMS sends to the wrong addresses, forcing the telco to halt its service.

Telstra CEO Andy Penn apologised to customers for potential compromisation of their data. Picture: David Swan/ The Australian.

Damage from the fire that has taken down Telstra services across parts of Australia caused some SMS messages to be sent to the wrong addresses, triggering privacy concerns, chief executive Andy Penn said today.

The fire, which hit regular and backup power at Telstra’s Chatswood exchange in Sydney, triggered a corruption in SMS messages services that forced the telco to shut off the service “within minutes,” Mr Penn said.

“We don’t know the extent of that [SMS misdirection] but the action we immediately took was to safeguard customers’ privacy. We closed the SMS platform down until we could basically reroute that and ensure the integrity of the messages.”

Having messages corrupted is “extraordinarily unusual,” he said. “I’ve never known that to happen before.”

The power outage, which began just before 2pm (AEDT), hurt both mobile and fixed line services, with up to 30 per cent of traffic downed across the country. An outage map showing affected areas included not just New South Wales but also Victoria, Queensland, South Australia and Western Australia.

It had widespread consequences, with nine Jetstar flights delayed due to disruptions to check-in ports, and NAB warning its online customers of delays to SMS alerts.

“The fire brigade had to isolate the power and we had to redirect the traffic away from the exchange,” Mr Penn said. “I’m pleased to say more than 70 per cent of the traffic continued to operate as normal.

“The good news is no-one was hurt in the incident and those services were all restored within a couple of hours.”

Despite the gravity of the problems, Telstra will not offer general compensation, such as a free data day. Instead, individual customers can contact the telco to raise issues, he said.

By 3.30pm, Telstra started to see a restoration on call services, but SMS messages were down until later in the afternoon.

Elsewhere, trains on NSW’s Hunter line were also affected by the fire.

The outage is the eighth to hit Telstra in 12 months. Last year’s outages led to Chief Operating Officer Kate McKenzie’s resignation, and her replacement this year by Tesla board member Robyn Denholm.

But the Telstra, despite grappling with the series of nationwide outages last year, this week retained its ranking as Australia’s most valuable brand in a global survey.

with AAP