Telstra must ‘face the music’ after outage chaos: Minister

Telstra boss Vicki Brady has apologised for the company’s mass outage on Wednesday, as the Communications Minister Anika Wells vowed the government will hold the telco to account, saying it must now “face the music”.

Wells, speaking in Canberra on Friday, said that as Telstra had now confirmed to the Triple Zero Custodian that the outage is resolved, attention could shift to the formal investigation into the company being conducted by the regulator, as well as to the telco’s work to begin repairing its reputation with Australians.

“Like all Australians, I did not want or expect to be dealing with another mass outage so soon after the Optus incident,” Wells said. “The last few days have been really difficult for many Australians, and now that Telstra has resolved its outage, it is time for Telstra to face the music.”

She said: “Telstra has held special trust from Australians”.

“It has been respected as the premium service. It is an iconic company. It has a rich history, but that trust really stands in peril today.”

“It is going to take Telstra a lot of time and a lot of work to rebuild that trust with Australians. And I want Australians to know that the government will hold Telstra to account,” Wells said.

Additionally, Wells said that of the hundreds of welfare checks conducted on customers whose Triple Zero calls had failed, no adverse outcomes had been identified.

Wells was joined by Australian Communications and Media Authority deputy chair, Adam Suckling, who said the agency was taking “with the utmost seriousness” its investigation into whether Telstra has complied with its legal and regulatory obligations. This includes “a range of new measures that the government introduced to beef up the Triple Zero system.”

Under those powers, Telstra can face civil penalties of up to $30m, Suckling said. “So we will be working very hard to hold them to account,” Suckling said.

The comments followed a tense press conference held at Telstra’s Sydney offices earlier in the morning, in which Brady, the CEO, broke her silence on the outage after returning from an overseas family holiday.

”We have let our customers and Australians down, and for that, I am deeply sorry,” Brady told a press conference in Sydney on Friday.

“We take trust in Triple Zero extremely seriously, and it’s our responsibility to do everything in our power to make sure calls are answered and transferred immediately.”

Brady addressed this week’s network outages for the first time after ending her leave early and flying back to Australia. She wasn’t 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 about 4.30am. But Brady, who was overseas, says she wasn’t told until about 7am, in what was her evening.

“I 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,” Brady said.

“I was contacted when it hit a certain threshold, and it was right around that time that we also then notified key stakeholders like the minister’s office and all of those key requirements.”

She also defended the company’s handling of the outage, saying it followed planned protocols.

“We do have very clear processes around how we manage incidents, and they do escalate through different levels,” she said.

“And this did propagate, and once it hit the right thresholds, all of the right parties were notified.”

Police are investigating the death of a person in regional South Australia on Wednesday. They have not linked the death to the outage and are examining its cause and circumstances, with a report to go to the coroner. Wells also said there appeared to be “no causative link” between the outage and the death and said she was disappointed by the federal opposition’s commentary suggesting a potential link.

Brady and chief financial officer Michael Ackland offered their condolences to the person’s family and said Telstra was assisting South Australian authorities, including on whether there was any connection to the outage. Ackland said a review of Telstra’s 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.

“Our thoughts remain with the person’s family and loved ones,” 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 customers’ phones showing the correct time.

Brady rejected suggestions that Telstra’s job cuts or outsourcing had contributed to the failure. “There is no indication that any restructuring of jobs has impacted on this particular issue,” she said, adding that the company’s “people and our processes worked as they should have”.

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 an investigation would cover whether Telstra’s redundancy systems had worked as intended .

Governance expert Dean Paatsch, co-founder of proxy advice firm Ownership Matters, said the board of Telstra would have the power and discretion to cut bonuses as a result of the outage.

“The directors have discretion under the terms of the scheme to take account of this,” Paatsch said. “There’s many instances where boards, notwithstanding excellent financial performance, have taken into account external events.”

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 Telstra’s 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 in Victoria and New South Wales and crippled payments systems nationally.

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