Telstra fires up over mixed messages

Telstra will investigate after a fire at one of its exchanges caused some text messages to be sent to the wrong customers.

Telstra chief executive Andrew Penn said the messaging mix-up was a serious concern, as reported in The Australian.

“It appears some SMS messages were corrupted, which resulted in some of those going to the incorrect address,” he said.

“We don’t know the extent of that, but the action we immediately took was to safeguard customers’ privacy. We closed the SMS platform down until we could basically reroute that and ensure integrity of messages.”

Penn said the problem was triggered by a fire that erupted at Telstra’s Chatswood exchange, in Sydney, last Thursday.

“I’ve never known that to happen before. Obviously, when there’s a serious fire it’s hard to predict how that impacts technology, but it’s something we need to investigate,” he said.

The fire took out mobile and fixed services for customers nationwide.