Telstra’s outage a get ouf of jail card for 800 offenders

A Telstra outage left correctional officers unable to monitor almost 800 accused and convicted criminals for more than 24 hours.

A Telstra outage left correctional officers unable to monitor almost 800 accused and convicted criminals for more than 24 hours. Picture: AAP

Telstra is under attack after a network outage left correctional officers unable to electronically monitor almost 800 accused and convicted criminals for more than 24 hours.

The outage, which began about 8am on Friday and was not resolved until noon on Saturday, was the same that affected eftpos terminals across several states, leaving thousands of people unable to make card payments.

Just days earlier, access to some Telstra apps and the company’s website, including cloud services, was limited.

South Australian Correctional Services Minister Corey Wingard said the outage affecting the monitoring of accused and convicted criminals was “totally unacceptable”. “Telstra know very firmly how we feel … we have outlined our dissatisfaction with what’s gone on,” he said.

Of the 774 people unable to be tracked via their ankle bracelets during the outage, one remained unaccounted for as of last night.

Robert Carl Stehr, who has a criminal history, had on Thursday been granted home detention bail on a charge of aggravated theft using force. Stehr, 43, was fitted with a monitoring device, with the last signal detected at 6.50am on Friday.

It is believed the battery of his device could be flat or that his device has not resynchronised with the network. His most serious ­offence was aggravated assault.

“There were a very small number of devices with which we had to have some manual intervention, less than eight, I think,” Correctional Services Department chief executive David Brown said.

“The rest of the devices automatically reconnected to the network as Telstra’s outage was resolved.”

Mr Brown said there was “no obvious way” offenders would have known their device was not transmitting in real-time.

Retrospective analysis of each individual’s movements during the outage identified a small number of breaches.

About 400 were on strict bail orders, with the rest mostly ­people sentenced to home detention. Fifty-two were parolees.

Mr Brown would not specify the most serious crimes, other than to say some faced “major ­indictable offences”.

He said a back-up plan that included making 700 phone calls and 300 home visits was implemented immediately.

Premier Steven Marshall promised a thorough investi­gation, which he described as a “complete breakdown of the ­system”.

“This is a completely and utterly unacceptable failure and we’ll be taking corrective action, making sure this can’t occur in South Australia again,” he said.

A similar, shorter shutdown of the system occurred in May.

Mr Marshall said a major focus of the investigation would be why only South Australia’s monitoring system was affected.

The electronic monitoring system of other states, including Victoria and NSW, switch to ­alternative mobile networks if Telstra is down, ensuring continuous coverage during outages.

A Telstra spokesman said the company took full responsibility for the outage, but it was incumbent on governments to ensure they had back up measures as 100 per cent reliability could never be guaranteed. The “complex” outage was caused by an issue in a supplier’s network that resulted in intermittent authentication of devices, he said.

“It took time to isolate faulty equipment and initial restoration attempts were unsuccessful, which contributed to the time taken to get devices back online.”