The days of the big “T” being the gold standard for telecommunications in Australia appear to be long gone, with this incident coming just a few weeks after a similar outage that affected NBN and 4G networks. And who could forget the triple-0 debacle on May 4, that saw emergency calls go unanswered?

If this sort of malfunction happened even 20 years ago, no-one would have really noticed besides the too-cool kids with their Nokia 5110s and the businessmen with their flip phones. Back then everyone still carried cash in their wallets and if you couldn’t call someone you’d just wait until you saw them, it was no big deal.

We like to think we’re all space-age and so very advanced but the fact of the matter is that massive multinationals carried on business long before the mobile phone was around. Not just your Sonys and Fords of the world, but even further back to the East India Company in the 17^th century.

But years of “progress” have led us to this point, where a mobile phone network goes down and all of a sudden no-one can make any purchases because the eftpos is down and wallets contain only plastic cards. And won’t someone think of the children? These thousands of poor little dears who can’t do their lessons because Google is down and their laptops are useless, left to (shock, horror) talk to other humans who occupy the same meat-space. 

Good grief, what happened to the humans of old, who sailed the seas and climbed the mountains and explored from sea to shining sea? Are we all now so useless because of the failure of technology that, quite frankly, seems to have come from Star Trek?

Captain Kirk would know what to do, he’d punch an alien and flirt with a green-skinned woman before Scotty got the network back online and then they’d warp off to some other part of the galaxy before next week’s episode.

All joking aside, this is 2018 and surely, surely it can’t be that hard to design a piece of technology that works and keeps working. In the mystic world of IT they have things called “redundant systems” and “backups” that automatically kick in when something falls over.

If Bob’s Building Supplies can keep their computers going like that, why can’t Telstra? Something or someone needs fixing here.