If there’s one lesson we learned from the Optus outage last year, it’s that the difference between a corporate crisis and a corporate calamity depends in large part on how it’s communicated.
Telstra’s outage response on Wednesday was conducted well in some ways, but poorly in others. The scale of the disruption was the first problem. It threw train timetables in Australia’s two major cities into varying degrees of chaos and left many merchants unable to take digital payments, to say nothing of vast numbers of consumers unable to use their mobile phones for calls or data.
Where Telstra did appear to do well was in its ability to restore 90 per cent of services within about six hours.
But, much like Optus’ decision to take days to reveal the full scale of its disastrous Triple Zero outage, it was in transparency that Telstra let itself down. There should be no minimising the level of chaos when the company’s representative stands on a media stage to apologise.
It was Telstra’s chief financial officer Michael Ackland who drew the short straw because his boss Vicki Brady was on holidays overseas. He stood before the media on Wednesday morning to issue an apology to Telstra’s almost 25 million customers at the same time as he downplayed the outage’s severity.
He was calm, so that’s a tick, but used the word “intermittent” to describe the nature of the outage so often – six times in about as many minutes – that it sounded like a tic.
If customers need to make urgent calls or businesses cannot transact at any point, or commuters cannot catch the train to work, intermittency is academic. Some communications are extremely time-sensitive.
And then there was Ackland’s suggestion that the number of customers affected was in the thousands, not tens of thousands or millions. That’s hard to believe.
Telstra has about 25 million active mobile services in the hands of its retail customers. More or less everyone seems to have been affected by the outage, as a segment on morning radio showed.
Sydney talkback station 2GB’s host James Willis tried to call his executive producer, technician and boss on air. “The number is not available from this service,” came the response each time.
So Ackland’s claim sounds a lot like minimisation – and if time proves this estimate to be woefully short of the reality, that won’t play well in the ultimate examination of Telstra’s response.
The other demarcation line between crisis and catastrophe is access to Triple Zero calls. Ackland had trouble being definitive about how many emergency calls were affected by the outage.
If someone has experienced a dire medical emergency that they couldn’t communicate, then the Telstra outage crisis will have far more significant ramifications.
Optus learned this the hard way when it had a major outage that affected Triple Zero that was linked to fatalities. Dozens of welfare checks were underway on Wednesday afternoon, Communications Minister Anika Wells confirmed.
A gold-standard response to any corporate disaster is to have its most senior representative as the public face of dealing with the problem.
It was unfortunate for Telstra that its boss, Brady, was on annual leave overseas, leaving Ackland to deputise. She is reportedly on her way back to Australia. Wells too cut short her leave on Wednesday.
Unfortunately, Ackland couldn’t provide answers about the root cause of the problem but did confirm that there was no evidence so far that malicious actors are involved. This more or less put paid to One Nation’s Barnaby Joyce’s earlier airing of conspiracy theories about possible Chinese involvement.
Telstra customers pay a premium for its network, which it markets in part on better coverage and reliability than its competitors. It raised mobile phone plan prices by up to 17 per cent in March, the second round of cost increases in just 10 months.
Those people aren’t paying for the trains to stop, intermittently or not.
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