00:02Alone, stuck, and unable to call for help.
00:05That's how the Telstra outage left Lynn Donohue's 95-year-old mother,
00:10who lives independently in her own home.
00:12I went over to find her on the floor, in the kitchen, rather distressed,
00:18because she said, I've been pushing the alarm, but no one came.
00:22Lynn's mother wears a medical alarm watch,
00:25which automatically sends notifications to emergency contacts
00:28whenever it detects a fall.
00:30She was disappointed and said, I've been pressing the button.
00:34Like, she knew she was doing the right thing.
00:36But the outage meant the distress signal was beaming into the void.
00:40It disrupted an enormous amount of public transport,
00:43and people expect to get to and from work.
00:4679-year-old Rita was on a train to get home,
00:49but ended up stuck at Sydney's Central Station for 12 hours,
00:53before she could get onto a bus back to Victoria.
00:56We were just in a room on our own,
00:59and there were some quite feral, but really different sort of people in there.
01:03I think we need to be aware that we can't always rely on technology.
01:07We need to be self-sufficient.
01:09While old tech-like landlines weren't affected,
01:12the outage highlighted the importance of having backups and fail-safes
01:16to ensure that the increasingly wireless world we live in
01:19keeps on spinning, no matter the fault.
01:22We expect it not to happen again.
01:24You know, we buy a service from Telstra.
01:27We expect that service to be provided for our services,
01:31for essential services like hospitals and public transport.
01:34An expectation large telecoms have failed to meet four times in the last three years.
01:44We expect that service to be provided for our services,
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