The phones! They were one of the basic utilities of the 20th century, and were just about as reliable as death and taxes. Even when then power grid went down, you still had a fair shot of getting a phone call through thanks to the reliability of the Plain Old Telephone Service.

Today, we eschew the simplicity of copper and mechanical switches for the supreme bandwidth and capability of high-speed cellular connectivity. With that, we accept that the additional complexity comes with a risk of complicated failures that bring everything tumbling down. Australia’s largest telecommunications provider found that out to its peril just a few short months ago.

Networked Failures

Generally, we expect our telecommunications networks to be supremely reliable. There is no moment of the day when someone doesn’t need to make a call, particularly in emergencies, and the wheels of industry and commerce depend on constant connectivity these days. Tolerance for failure is generally very thin. Despite this, and the efforts of engineers to maintain uptime at as many nines as possible, Telstra fell badly short on July 8th, 2026. The company had a nationwide outage that affected 8.8 million people, leaving them unable to make calls or connect to the network at all.

The cause of the outage would prove to be particularly embarrassing. Telstra owns and operates a highly advanced cellular network, offering 4G and 5G service across the nation’s cities and much of its outback areas. The company may outwardly appear to be a shining beacon of modern connectivity, but there was something dank lurking in the company’s server closets. Namely, three aging network time servers that had the capacity to bring the whole system to its knees.

The culprit? A Microchip Technologies SSU 2000 NTP server. The model dates back to the early 2000s. Twenty four years later, Telstra still relied upon three of the units to provide network time protocol (NTP) services across its network. The servers were generally perfectly adequate in this role on any given day. That was, until the Melbourne server had a wobble.

A technician was working in the early morning to replace a backup power feed in the chassis housing the server. This caused the server to be rebooted at 3:38 AM, which normally would not be a problem. However, at some point in the last two decades or so, the server had gone through a configuration change. While it was originally intended to be a Stratum 3 NTP server, getting its time reference from a Stratum 2 unit, that process had failed at some point. It had been reconfigured instead to use its internal GPS card to gain time directly from the satellite network instead. Unfortunately, the server was also remarkably old, and suffered from a well-documented GPS date rollover bug, such that when it rebooted, it reported the time as 2006 rather than 2026.

The problem that stemmed from this was because time is critical to authentication. An endless cascade of devices downstream of the NTP server picked up the wrong time, and started using it to sign digital certificates and the like. This immediately caused other systems on the network to reject the spurious traffic with certificates that were 20 years out of date. The impact was swift and vast—Telstra was quickly facing a nationwide outage affecting millions of customers.

The issue was first detected at 4:20 AM. The naughty server was isolated by 7:11 AM, but it would take until 10:30 AM to identify all the network components which had received erroneous time data. It took several hours further—until 4 PM—to properly quell the NTP issues. In the meantime, a significant portion of the country had seen its phones offline all day, and entire rail networks had ground to a halt as their Telstra-based communications systems went completely offline.

Later submissions to a government inquiry would reveal Telstra had received two reminders to patch the GPS card, in 2020 and 2022. The vendor itself had issued warnings about the GPS rollover bug as early as November 2000. A decision not to fix the bug had been taken as recently as January 2026, because the undocumented change to have the server rely on GPS time was unknown, and thus the update was considered unnecessary. Simply patching the system would have prevented the issue from ever occurring in the first place.

The issue once again brought telecommunications availability in Australia to the forefront of the conversation. Repeat outages across Australian mobile networks have led to particular concerns about the ability for people to reach emergency services by calling Triple Zero from mobile handsets. The latest failure on Telstra’s behalf has led the local telecommunications industry to issue new guidance to the public on what to do when a call to Triple Zero doesn’t go through.

Modern handsets are designed to switch to a different cellular network in the case an emergency call can’t be connected—a process called emergency camp-on. However, this process takes time, and the caller will often hear silence on the line while the phone is attempting to connect. The new advice is that callers should hang up and try again straight away if their first call to Triple Zero doesn’t connect within a few seconds. On the second call, though, the phone should be given up to a minute to find another network to get the call through.

In the case of this outage, camp-on functionality worked—some 3,200 Triple Zero calls were passed to Optus and TPG networks when Telstra’s failed. However, there were some ongoing issues that saw a further 604 Triple Zero calls fail over the period to 2 PM the next day.

Overall, Telstra’s failure was a major one. It’s rare for a major network to go down so completely and over such a wide geographical area. The fact that it happened because of an undocumented change to an ancient network appliance is all the more embarrassing. It will drive home the message that documenting even seemingly minor changes is important, with the lesson likely to be told in the halls of the Australian telco for some decades to come.

Quite a few in our community make a bit of cash on the side by selling our creations, and it’s not uncommon to find that a project which catches your eye can be picked up as a kit for a few of your preferred currency units. But there’s a problem facing such tiny producers in the form of regulations intended for large businesses which are beyond their ability to comply with. [Alain Pannetrat] writes for the Lectronz marketplace about one of them, the new European Union packaging waste regulations.

At face value it sounds like a good idea, that suppliers should be responsible in some way for the disposal of their packaging. It discourages excessive packaging and encourages recycling, indeed the EU even describe the scheme as boosting business. The problem is that its administration is left to individual member states, and someone selling across the whole bloc would have to join multiple schemes. The hefty price is nothing to a large enterprise, but impossible for a tiny one. He makes a very good point, that it’s difficult to claim to champion innovation, while also imposing something like this on grass-roots innovators. Going by the experiences of our acquaintances in this space an extra burden on top of that presented by the current unstable tariff and customs situation involved in selling to the USA would likely be the straw which broke the camel’s back.

In practice we suspect that many are simply doing the same as they have with compliance marking and waste electronic equipment regulations, simply not bothering and hoping they fly under the radar and never get caught. We hope we won’t end up reporting on any future crackdown, the landscape has definitely changed since we tried our hand in this business.

If you don’t actually need one, you’d be forgiven for thinking a hearing aid just makes everything louder for the wearer. Especially since there are plenty of shady products out there which will do exactly that for just four easy payments of $29.99. But the reality is considerably more complex, as a proper hearing aid needs to be capable of selectively enhancing certain frequencies while squashing down others.

The technical challenges involved in pulling that off in a device small enough to fit inside the human ear and run off of a tiny battery are considerable — and while there’s undoubtedly been some degree of artificial price inflation going on over the years, there’s a reason proper hearing aids have been so much more expensive than their “As Seen on TV” counterparts. These same challenges are also why DIY and open source hardware hearing aids have struggled to gain much traction.

But over the last few years the situation has changed. In 2022 the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) established the framework by which hearing aids could be sold over the counter (OTC). Although they’re generally less capable than their prescription counterparts and not suitable for individuals with profound hearing loss, the wide commercial availability of OTC hearing aids has kicked off a competition between manufacturers to deliver more affordable devices.

That competition entered a new phase earlier this month when the FDA granted approval for Samsung’s Galaxy Earbuds to fall under the same category. This follows a similar decision made about Apple’s AirPods back in 2024. The two biggest players in the smartphone market being able to offer their earbuds as OTC hearing aids represents a unique value proposition. Not only are they priced for mass market consumption, but many individuals who would be interested in purchasing an OTC hearing aid will already own them and need only to enable the feature with a software update.

Given how different the situation is today than even just five years ago it’s worth asking just what qualifies as a over-the-counter hearing aid, and how the shifting definition of these devices can inform the community’s efforts to develop open hardware solutions.

What is a Hearing Aid, Anyway?

We’ve already covered what a hearing aid isn’t, but before we go too much further it’s a good idea to clarify what exactly a hearing aid does in comparison to a simple audio amplifier, which in the industry are officially known as Personal Sound Amplification Products (PSAPs). This is a topic we’ve touched on previously here at Hackaday, but the short version is that since the 1980s or so, the frequencies that a hearing aid amplifies have been tailored to match the specific auditory deficiencies of the wearer.

Traditionally, getting a hearing aid prescribed would require going to an audiologist and getting an audiogram. This chart plots the results of a hearing test, and shows how well the patient can hear various frequencies. With this data, it’s possible to quantify the severity of a patient’s hearing loss and determine where a hearing aid could improve the situation. This information could then be programmed into a hearing aid to provide a bespoke amplification profile that takes into account the needs of the wearer.

It’s worth noting that this is only in the context of relatively modern digital hearing aids, essentially those created after the introduction of solid state electronics. Prior to that point, hearing aids were closer to what we would now consider PSAPs and amplified incoming audio indiscriminately.

Defining a Middle Ground

With this in mind, the primary difference between a prescription hearing aid and an OTC model is that the audiologist is cut out of the loop. That means there’s no audiogram, and in turn no data to program the hearing aid’s filters with. The specifics of this does vary from model to model, and both Samsung and Apple offer some basic audio testing tools that can help the user fine-tune their experience. But at this point, no OTC hearing aid product is capable of diagnosing the wearer’s hearing to the same level as a comprehensive hearing test performed by an audiologist

That being the case, it might seem like an OTC hearing aid is just a PSAP. But in their ruling, the FDA established the formal requirements for a device that falls somewhere in the middle. The full document, Medical Devices; Ear, Nose, and Throat Devices; Establishing Over-the-Counter Hearing Aids, comes in at around 200 pages if you’re looking for some light reading.

Fortunately, the agency provides a boiled-down list of what features a device must have to meet the definition of an OTC hearing aid. Some of the requirements have to do with the packaging and marketing of the product, which of course are important for a medical device, but it’s the technical parameters that we’re interested in.

The FDA specifies that all OTC hearing aids must use air-conduction, that is, operate with a speaker inserted into the ear canal. The alternative would be bone conduction, which is generally used in cases with more profound hearing loss. The devices must also allow users to adjust, at least to some degree, the output to match their specific needs.

The intention with this second requirement goes deeper than a simple volume control as you’d have in an PSAP. In lieu of the sort of tailored output a prescription hearing aid would offer, the OTC device can offer a selection of pre-defined audio filter profiles which the user could flip through. At the risk of oversimplifying things, it’s a bit like the audio presets for different genres of music that modern headphones and earbuds usually offer in that the user can cycle through different profiles to find what best matches the current environment.

When combined with the acknowledgement that OTC hearing aids can utilize wireless technology to communicate with another device, it’s not hard to see how the smartphone fits into the equation. While a stand-alone device is capable of meeting the requirements necessary for OTC hearing aid classification, being able to connect to the user’s phone to easily switch between audio profiles on the fly makes for a greatly improved user experience. Additionally, by playing tones through the earbuds, software on the phone can perform a hearing test on the user — the results of which can be used to fine-tune the output beyond what’s possible with simple presets.

Hackers, Take Note

Of course, anyone looking to build an open source hearing aid probably isn’t looking for FDA approval. The goal is likely to make the technology cheaper and more accessible, especially in areas where getting a commercially produced hearing aid may be difficult. As such, the new over-the-counter classification may not seem terribly important for folks like us.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t pick up some tips from what companies like Samsung, Apple, and Jabra are doing. By bringing the user’s smartphone into the mix, they have made hearing aids more accessible and easier to operate. Instead of trying to pack all of the functionality directly into the wearable, using a smartphone to do some of that heavy lifting opens up a lot of new possibilities. There are naturally trade-offs when switching a hardware problem for a software one, especially when dealing with mobile operating systems, but it may be a compromise worth making if it means getting this sort of assistive tech to more people that need it.