A cheap 25-year-old piece of hardware broke Telstra. It’s a wake-up call for other businesses

At a two-and-a-half-hour Senate grilling on Friday, Telstra executives revealed just how bad their catastrophic outage earlier this month was. At its peak, it affected about 45% of calls and data across the telco giant’s national network. The root cause was a failed software update of a piece of hardware – specifically, a server, manufactured in 2011 and worth roughly $30,000, that helps keep accurate time across the network. Telstra noticed some issues with the time server in October last…