Boy, can I pick ’em. Of all days to choose to rely on public transport, I unerringly chose the one when a massive mobile data outage threw the transport systems in multiple states into chaos.
The entire outage apparently was the result of a single data centre clock going tits-up. Mobile data, like GPS, relies on extremely accurate timekeeping to counter the tiny but critical (for high-end data functions) effects of relativity on communications between satellites and the ground.
That was all pretty abstract to millions of people unable to use EFTPOS (always carry a small amount of cash, people!) or catch a train, which, as I stood among the crowds milling about at Melbourne’s Southern Cross station waiting vainly for replacement buses, raises a single, glaring question:
Why didn’t they plan for this?
At least one tech boss is asking the same question.
Data centre baron Bevan Slattery has blamed government-owned train operators for Wednesday’s meltdown, saying it was not solely Telstra’s fault that services ground to a halt.
As Slattery says, if your entire system is critically reliant on one technology, and you know that technology has failed catastrophically at least twice in the last couple of years, wouldn’t you, I don’t know, have a contingency plan ready to go?
“Let’s be really clear here. The fact that the failure of a single mobile network, that is designed to run 99.95 per cent of the time, brought down entire rail networks is an issue with the network architecture for the rail operator, not Telstra,” Mr Slattery said.
“If you own critical infrastructure or a critical resource in which connectivity is mandatory for the operation of your business, it is incumbent upon you and your organisation to have the necessary network resiliency built into your business, or suffer the consequences when a 99.95 per cent network hits the 0.05 per cent of downtime.”
Let’s not kid ourselves that it’s simply undoable. The Victorians (the era, not the woke Australian state) ran massive railway networks perfectly fine without even radios.
Today’s massive government and bureaucratic apparatus, by contrast, couldn’t even organise replacement buses properly. Crowds waiting for heavily trafficked routes to major regional cities repeatedly saw just a single coach roll up. Meanwhile, for little-used routes, coaches departed without a single passenger aboard.
This wasn’t just an annoying glitch. It was a stark reminder of how fragile our ‘modern’ infrastructure has become under the tender mercies of governments drunk on central planning and the delusion that complex systems can run on fairy dust and good intentions. When a single clock in a data centre can paralyse transport across states, you know the ‘resilience’ these clowns boast about is as solid as a vegan steak.
The political class, predictably, treated it like just another Tuesday. Communications Minister Anika Wells confirmed her office wasn’t notified for two-and-a-half hours, then spent the day pointing at Telstra. The opposition pointed right back.
Opposition housing spokesman Andrew Bragg says network outages have become “the new normal” under the Albanese government, blaming Labor’s “socialist-style approach” for a lack of market competition during a heated clash with Industrial Relations Minister Amanda Rishworth […]
“the country is on the highway to hell here with a high tax, high regulation, huge government. And there’s no competition, no innovation.”
He’s right. But the fallacy is that the Liberals would have done any better. The brutal fact is that both sides of the uniparty have spent decades building systems optimised for virtue-signalling and rent-seeking rather than reliability. Telstra’s network, critical infrastructure in all but name, fails and the response is shrugs, inquiries and more regulation that will achieve precisely nothing. Rishworth deflected to Telstra, while shadow minister Sarah Henderson copped flak for testing triple-0 herself. The priorities couldn’t be clearer: protect the narrative, not the punters.
Australia once built things that worked. Now we build fragility dressed up as progress. The summer ahead will test just how much more ‘new normal’ Australians are willing to tolerate before they demand something better than this incompetent, high-tax, low-reliability circus.
