Updated ,first published
Telstra boss Vicki Brady has apologised for the companyโs mass outage on Wednesday, and says she has spoken to the Communications Minister Anika Wells and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.
โWe have let our customers and Australians down, and for that, I am deeply sorry,โ Brady told a press conference in Sydney on Friday.
โWe take trust in Triple Zero extremely seriously, and itโs our responsibility to do everything in our power to make sure calls are answered and transferred immediately.โ
Brady addressed this weekโs network outages for the first time after ending her leave early and flying back to Australia. She wasnโt aware of the outage for several hours after it happened.
The first signs of the outage emerged about 3am, before Telstra realised there was an outage at around 4.30am. But Brady, who was overseas, says she wasnโt told until about 7am, which was in the evening where Brady was.
โI first became aware when I saw a missed message on Teams, and a voicemail was left for me by a head of our operations team. I immediately called him back on Teams, so we spoke within minutes,โ Brady said.
โI was contacted when it hit a certain threshold, and it was right around that time that we also then notified key stakeholders like the ministerโs office and all of those key requirements.โ
She also defended the companyโs handling of the outage, saying it followed planned protocols.
โWe do have very clear processes around how we manage incidents, and they do escalate through different levels,โ she said.
โAnd this did propagate, and once it hit the right thresholds, all of the right parties were notified.โ
It comes as South Australia Police investigate the death of a person in regional South Australia on Wednesday. Police have not linked the death to the outage and are examining its cause and circumstances, with a report to go to the coroner.
Brady and chief financial officer Michael Ackland offered their condolences to the personโs family and said Telstra was assisting South Australian authorities, including on whether there was any connection to the outage. Ackland said a review of Telstraโs records had so far found no record of Triple Zero calls from the numbers associated with the address, that there was good mobile signal and no local outage in the area at the time, and that a related Triple Zero call from another number had connected successfully.
โOur thoughts remain with the personโs family and loved ones,โ Ackland said.
This masthead first revealed the outages were caused by a glitch that reset crucial timing systems to November 2006, causing parts of the network to reject customersโ phones showing the correct time.
Brady rejected suggestions that Telstraโs job cuts or outsourcing had contributed to the failure. โThere is no indication that any restructuring of jobs has impacted on this particular issue,โ she said, adding that the companyโs โpeople and our processes worked as they should haveโ.
Brady, who has run Telstra since 2022 and was paid a salary of $6.7 million in 2025, would not say whether executives would forgo bonuses over the outage, saying remuneration was governed by clear processes overseen by the board. She said whether Telstraโs redundancy systems had worked as intended would form part of the investigation.
Communications Minister Anika Wells rounded on Telstra on Wednesday, demanding โtotal transparencyโ over the outages after the company took hours to inform her office that it had begun.
Telstra has kicked off an internal analysis of the outages while the communications regulator, ACMA, has already commenced its own probe on behalf of the government. Telstra was fined more than $3 million in 2024 over an earlier outage that stopped some customers reaching Triple Zero. The telco is now facing potential penalties in the tens of millions of dollars.
Ackland said 177 cases had been referred to police and seven people were identified as needing assistance, which was passed to emergency authorities. He said customers would be compensated through Telstraโs normal processes, with affected people and businesses able to contact the company to make a claim.
The outages left hundreds of people unable to contact Triple Zero, knocked out train services across Victoria and New South Wales and crippled payments systems nationally.
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David Swan is the technology editor for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. He was previously technology editor for The Australian newspaper.Connect via X or email.