We know how to prevent an outage like this. Here's why we can't

I am so happy to go up to perfect strangers and start chatting with them. I am unashamedly short which means I have to rely on the kindness of said strangers to get things from the top shelf.

And I am on the phone, all day, every day. All day. Every day. Except Wednesday this week when I discovered that Telstra, my telecommunication provider, wasn't providing.

Couldn't make calls. I mean, that's my whole life. I ring people I know, I ring people I don't know. I have my AirPods in pretty much the whole working day. Worse, I couldn't get calls. The part of my life where I call people is shared equally with me sending my phone number to experts who I hope will call me, Dear god. I had steam coming out my ears instead of fascinating chats incoming.

The great 2026 Telstra outage. Third time in 12 months. Horrific memories of the Optus outage last year, linked to multiple deaths because triple zero went down.

On Wednesday, our biggest telco blamed a software defect. Checks out. Stuff breaks all the time. Even stuff that isn't broken can play up. Usually that doesn't include stopping millions of us from contacting each other. It doesn't stop the trains. It doesn't stop us from paying for things, which we can't use until we pay for them. At 4pm on Wednesday, Telstra declared the problem solved.

That was nearly 12 hours after it started. 12 hours of not being able to do my job. 12 hours of being relieved that WhatsApp was still working. And a few hours of explaining to people my age how WhatsApp works. Plus on Thursday morning there were still problems with trains. The incredible Downdetector, which tells you what's not working and where, revealed comments from Telstra users, everywhere from Western Australia to the Whitsundays.

There are, also, problems with Liberal members of parliament. My goodness. It seems shocking to me that Sarah Henderson decided to test the emergency line to see if it worked. Emergency Management Minister Kristy McBain said kids were taught not to "prank" triple zero. "Prank" might be too harsh. Henderson claims she was testing whether it worked. I wonder if she recognises how utterly irresponsible that was? Or no?

Then we've got Liberal senator Kerrynne Liddle who posted on Facebook (!) on Wednesday: "My office has received a report of a tragic death following an apparent failure to connect to triple zero during a life-or-death emergency amid Telstra's nationwide outage today."

South Australian police say they don't know about it.

We don't know yet - and won't really know for some time - if those unconnected calls to Triple 0 had consequences, such as the terrible loss of life when Optus's firewall upgrade triggered a fault that stopped phone access to emergency services in September last year. People died because our telecommunication services failed. As Anika Wells said on Wednesday, all our telcos now have strict requirements to check on those who tried to call triple zero and couldn't get through. We will know soon enough. But "check on" doesn't stop people dying.

So how can we prevent this? I asked Faraz Hasan, the director of research at the University of Canberra and an expert in telecommunication networks. He didn't laugh at me when I told him I felt like I'd lost part of my soul when the phones stopped working. And he reminded me that those networks underpin every single aspect of our lives. Health. Education. Transport. Banking. Our life relies on our connectivity.

So how do we protect that most delicate of networks?

There are all the basic elements we need to take care of - making sure that all the bits work together, that the many layers of the network, the software, the algorithm connect and the way they interconnect. Then there's the protection against malicious activity, ruled out in this case. Then he tried to explain time synchronisation to me and I think faded out on that one - every part of the network has to be set to the same time (as a person who struggles with setting her new oven clock this seems totally insurmountable) otherwise the trains don't run on time.

"All the devices in a telecommunication network have to maintain the same accurate time because everything happens in a sequence and if that sequence is disrupted, if that centralisation is lost, then things break down and networks have to be restarted again."

But Hasan has a brilliant idea. And I guess the only reason no-one's made it happen is that it would cost a bomb.

You need to make a back up. Or, as the expert puts it: "It is very well known in the telecommunication space that if you want to increase reliability you increase redundancy in the network."

In other words, you have a whole set-up that replicates what exists now. And you will only ever need it in an emergency.

"There are financial constraints that would limit having a lot of redundancy in the network." Telecommunication networks are already expensive and then we would double that expense. The idea is conceptually accurate, says Hasan. "Financially, it's not feasible."

As he points out, we can deal with some services going down. I hypothetically offer him unlimited money to fix the problem. So we can't replicate the whole thing but what could be feasible is having a backup just for the critical parts of the network. The bit which keeps hospitals running the whole time. And the trains.

Crucially, the bit which keeps triple zero running the whole time.

I confess I've been a Telstra customer since before it was even called Telstra. It costs more than any other network I've ever considered - but that's partly because it also does a better job doing what I needed it to do. Call folks in remote communities during COVID? Yep. Supplying the networks to make it possible to call wherever whenever? Yep. Make it possible for me to continue to work when I'm in outer wherever? Yep.

Usually.

But those are not nearly as crucial as calling triple zero during an emergency. We need an unbreakable back-up plan.