A software fault at a Telstra exchange in Hobart knocked out the Tasmanian government’s entire digital network for hours this morning, causing significant disruptions for the state’s health system, emergency communications, courts, schools and other government services.
Networking Tasmania, a Telstra subsidiary which provides telecommunications services for the state government, was at the centre of the outage.
Speaking to Pulse, a Telstra spokesperson said “a software fault at the Davey exchange impacted some services”.
“Our technicians attended the site and restored service as quickly as possible,” they said.
The outage began around 5am and was not resolved until 11am, according to Telstra.
Triple Zero services were not affected, but the TasGRN two-way radio system used by Tasmania Police, Ambulance Tasmania and the Tasmania Fire Service, was impacted.
“The issue affected some TasGRN services used by emergency services, including location tracking,” the Telstra spokesperson said.
According to Health and Community Services Union, the impact on hospitals was significant.
HACSU State Secretary Robbie Moore claimed the Royal Hobart Hospital activated a code yellow, meaning leave was restricted, extra staff were called in and some non-urgent appointments were cancelled.
“It has been quite chaotic,” Moore told Pulse.
“It’s caused a lot of inconvenience, delays and certainly frustration for patients and for people accessing the health system as well.”
He said staff were unable to access booking systems, pharmacy services and patient charts.
Moore accused the health department of trying to downplay the disruption.
“Unfortunately, health seem to keep trying to cover up issues,” he said.
“We’d prefer them to be open and transparent and let the community know what’s going on.”
Moore also questioned why a single software fault could cripple the entire government network, saying Telstra “should have contingency plans for this situation.”
Pulse repeatedly contacted the Department of Health for comment but received no response.
However later this afternoon, a Department of Health spokesperson said “no code yellow was called”.
“The Department has well-established processes that ensured there was no major impact to service delivery,” the spokesperson said.
“Health services have robust contingency plans to activate for situations like these to ensure service continuity.”
Greens technology spokesperson Tabatha Badger said digital outages were “becoming all too common across Tasmania.”
“Tasmania is incredibly reliant on single communications networks and it’s not good enough,” Badger said.
Service Tasmania confirmed its website, app and service centres were all affected before being restored around 9:43am.
Public schools were taken offline for the first hour of classes this morning, with the Department of Children, Education and Young People saying their public websites were also impacted until services were restored around 9:30am.
In a statement to Pulse, the Department of Premier and Cabinet said they have been continuing to “monitor the situation closely”.
“The issue has been substantially resolved,” they said.
“We are working with Telstra to address a small number of residual issues.”
The outage affected government offices, with staffers unable to get online or access many internal systems.
