Nearly 800 Criminals Dropped off the Radar This Weekend Because of Telstra

You may have heard that Telstra's nationwide service went down over the weekend and caused a bunch of problems. ANZ customers in New South Wales, Victoria, and Tasmania were unable to use Eftpos machines and ATMs, the ABC reported. Taxi drivers started knocking back credit card payments because the system was down. Oh, and in South Australia hundreds of criminals on house arrest quite literally dropped off the radar and remained unmonitored for 24 hours.

The Telstra outage caused the Department of Correctional Services' electronic monitoring system to crash on Saturday, resulting in 774 people on parole or home detention who were unable to be tracked after their ankle bracelets stopped working. Department staff had to perform home-visits and phone calls to track down the criminals and confirm their whereabouts. One of them—a man with a history of violence who was on strict home detention following a charge of aggravated theft—was still at large as recently as this morning.

"We've got one offender on intensive-bail supervision who had failed to report to his address after he was released by the court on bail on Thursday night and was due to travel to his address on Friday morning," chief executive of the department David Brown said over the weekend. "It was quickly established that it was a network outage with Telstra that was the root cause of the problem.”

South Australian police have since located the missing criminal, 43-year-old Robert Carl Staehr, and arrested him without incident, according to NewsCorp—but the outage is being flagged as an “unacceptable situation” that put the safety of the public at risk.

"This is a very serious breach, a very serious outage and there will be a full and thorough investigation," said South Australian Premier Steven Marshall on Sunday. "Clearly this is an unacceptable situation and clearly this is a situation that we cannot afford to occur in South Australia again."

In addition to the case of runaway Robert there were a handful of other breaches of monitoring conditions, Fairfax reports. It's thought that these must have been coincidental, however, as authorities don't believe the criminals could have known they weren’t being properly tracked.

"I can't say for certain but there was no obvious way in which the offender could look at their device and establish it was not working in the manner it should be," said Mr Brown, of the Department of Correctional Services. "That was certainly of benefit to us as we rolled out our program of additional phone and physical checks."