I looked at this story and my heart sank as I knew it would be another case of 'the military are wonderful and nothing to do with the civvy scum who make up the CS, and who are to blame for all our woes'. Nice to see some posts confirmed this. More seriously, I read this not as a bunch of random staff ringing the speaking clock, but actually a technical fault -
" "A ban was introduced to our newest telephone network, but due to a technical error with some IT servers there has been some inadvertent spending on the speaking clock which has now been stopped."
Now, to my simple brain that implies a problem with something to do with DII or some other element which made the phones dial it - the phrase about IT servers and spending seems a typically clunky way of saying 'technical problem not human fault'.