Stephanie Thompson, Murray Pioneer
Telstra is “sincerely sorry” for the impact of a cloud service crash last week that continues to “cripple” all three local councils.
The outage is continuing to impact Loxton Waikerie, Berri Barmera and Renmark Paringa councils, rendering them unable to complete almost all core functions.
District Council of Loxton Waikerie CEO David Beaton said the cloud service outage was “just not good enough”.
“To be out for six business days is an extraordinarily long period of time,” he said.
“We haven’t had access to phones, people haven’t been able to ring the council, and people haven’t been able to get online to pay their rates.
“It’s a week when rates are due.
“It’s frustrating all around.”
All three councils use a Telstra cloud service, hosted from a data centre in Victoria.
A Telstra spokesperson said it was a “highly complex issue” to resolve.
“Our teams, together with our partners, have been working around the clock to bring it back online,” the spokesperson said.
“While we’ve done this work, we’ve also been working with our impacted customers to find alternative solutions with over 80 per cent of all impacted customers now fully or partially restored.”
The Telstra spokesperson said cloud service access restoration was under way.
“Renmark Paringa, Loxton Waikerie and Berri Barmera councils have been working with us and our partner on a transition to a Microsoft cloud platform and we expect the first of their services to be restored today (Monday),” the spokesperson said.
“This transition was planned prior to this issue as we will be closing the service that experienced the outage later this year, however, we’ve accelerated their move given the issue.
“We’re sincerely sorry for the impact this issue has had on our customers and their residents.”
As part of the outage, councils are without access to data and various phone, email and electronic systems.
“The staff are going back and doing manual tasks because they can’t get onto the system because it’s all in the cloud,” Mr Beaton said.
In a media release last Friday, Berri Barmera CEO Tim Pfeiffer said the outage was having “profound” effects on the Riverland community.
“It is astonishing in this day and age for an outage to last so long,” he said.
“We are currently at day six of this Telstra CSX outage, despite having a service level agreement that allows outages of no more than two hours.
“The three Riverland councils do not currently know when or even if Telstra will be able to restore our cloud services.”
Meanwhile, Telstra mobile users in Barmera may have temporary disruptions over the next week.
A Telstra spokesperson said third party works are being carried out at Barmera’s mobile base station.
“While Optus undertakes some upgrade works at the site, Telstra has been asked to shut down its mobile base station in Barmera during the hours of 7am to 5pm between Tuesday 11 June to Tuesday 18 June,” the spokesperson said.
“Telstra mobile customers will receive text messages advising them of the upcoming works.
“Landline services and NBN internet services will not be impacted.
“The site will be online at the end of each work day.”
This article appeared in the Murray Pioneer, 12 June 2024.
