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Telstra outage: The night a network decided the year was 2006#

Netnod Tech Meeting 2026 digest Program Core pick 6 October 2026

Recording

Speakers: Sven-Christian Ebenhag - Netnod

Play the recording: Telstra outage: The night a network decided the year was 2006

  • Why: Outage postmortems are the highest-transfer-value content at an operator meeting, and the title suggests a time/date-handling fault at the root — a class of failure (certificate validity, RPKI/TLS time checks, protocol timers) that cuts across every network, not just one operator's.
  • What: A walkthrough of a real Telstra outage in which the network apparently behaved as if the date were 2006. (from title only — no abstract published)
  • How: Unknown until the talk; expect an incident timeline, root-cause analysis, and the detection/remediation path. Netnod's involvement suggests a Swedish/IX perspective on a global event.
  • Where applicable: Broadly applicable — time-dependence is universal in routing, PKI, and control-plane security. The specific trigger may be Telstra-topology-specific, but the lessons on time sanity checks and blast-radius control transfer anywhere.