Business
17 July, 2026
Telstra admits accountability for national outage during Senate inquiry
The national Telstra outage last week was triggered by maintenance work that caused the system's clocks to go back two decades, the telco says.
The national Telstra outage last week was triggered by maintenance work that caused the system's clocks to go back two decades, the telco says.
The national Telstra outage last week was triggered by maintenance work that caused the system's clocks to go back two decades, the telco says.
Telstra chief executive Vicki Brady and senior executives have been questioned in a Senate hearing over the outage that disrupted business, transport and access to Triple Zero (000).
Ms Brady told the hearing that the outage potentially could have been avoided had a 15-year-old server — which could have been replaced for $30,000 — been updated earlier.
When maintenance workers addressing a backup power issue restarted the server, the network time was reset.
"The NTP server in Exhibition St (in Melbourne) had an underlying software configuration, such that when the device restarted, it reset the date to 2006," Telstra said in a submission to the inquiry.
"We now believe this occurred because of an intentional design change that had previously been made to the equipment to fix an earlier fault.
"That design change had not been properly documented, which meant the maintenance team was not aware of the way the device would behave when restarted.
"Had that software update been completed or had the design change been properly documented and reflected in the maintenance procedure, the outage may not have occurred.
"That is clearly unacceptable.
"If maintenance work can trigger this kind of outage, it suggests our controls were not good enough."
The telco could be fined millions of dollars over the outage and face hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of compensation claims.
Ms Brady said the telco had written to 8.8 million individuals and businesses, and to larger business customers and enterprise customers.
She said the 8.8 million affected would not all get compensation.
"It will come down to what impact it has and whether people want to lodge a claim with us," Ms Brady said.
No guarantee there won't be more outages
Ms Brady told the hearing the company had commissioned an external expert to investigate and to test Telstra's findings.
Networks were "not infallible" in any sort of complex technological environment, Ms Brady said.
"But our job is to make sure we are taking the actions and we are taking those steps that will mitigate as best we can," she said.
"I would love to be able to sit here and say there will be zero outages. The reality of a complex network environment with fast-evolving technology — you just can't. No telco around the world could guarantee that."
But Ms Brady acknowledged that Telstra was at fault.
"Our controls and our processes definitely let us down and that impacted a lot of people and we are deeply sorry for that," she said.
"We let our customers down, we let the community down, and we fell short of what people rightly expect from us.
"For this, I am deeply sorry. Australians rely on Telstra every day to run businesses, stay in contact with family, access essential services and, most importantly, to get help in an emergency.
"When our network fails, the impact is real. I particularly want to acknowledge the concern caused by impacts to some Triple Zero calls. Triple Zero sits at the heart of public trust in Australia's communication system.
"Telstra has a critical role in that system and we take that responsibility extremely seriously. No-one should be left wondering whether a call for emergency help will get through."
45 per cent of calls, data affected at outage peak
At its peak on Wednesday, July 8, the outage impacted about 45 per cent of all calls and data sessions on Telstra's mobile network.
The telco's investigation also found 604 calls could not be made to Triple Zero.
"We completed 604 welfare checks, we worked closely with emergency services nationally and are not aware of any life-threatening outcomes as a result of the outage," Ms Brady said.
"In these cases, callers received an error message and the phone may have attempted to connect to an alternative mobile network.
"This issue was linked to the same software configuration that caused the original outage, but required a separate fix."
Ms Brady said Telstra implemented a solution at 10:38am on July 9 that addressed the issue affecting 000 calls.
"Since this solution was put in place, no further welfare checks have been required for this issue," she said.
Telstra received update alert in 2022
Telstra executives said the SSU 2000 server that caused the outage was still supported by Scientific Devices, which supplies the technology from Microchip.
Executives revealed that in 2022 and in January this year the company was alerted by the manufacturer that it needed to apply a software update, but that had not happened.
Executive Gerard Tracey said the outage might not have occurred if Telstra invested in updating the server earlier.
Ms Brady said when Telstra finally got around to implementing the update the change was "not documented".
"So when the maintenance team came to do the work on this server, which required them to power it down and take it offline … once they re-powered the server that sits within that, this particular GPS card behaved in a different way to what they expected," she said.
Ms Brady said there was a warning that the GPS card — a component that synchronises time in the system — could be affected.
"It had not had the firmware update put on it … there was definitely a reminder in January of this year that this update needed to be done. We believe it does go back several years that it was there," she said.
"Clearly, it's not acceptable that we ended up with this outage, that there was a software update that we hadn't done, even though I can understand why, at certain points, teams made those decisions. That's part of our investigation."
Asked whether there were other matters that had not been documented properly, Ms Brady said: "We have an overall risk management framework, but given this particular incident, obviously we need to go back and do further checks and ensure our controls and procedures are working."
Telstra could face a fine of up to $30m
Later at the hearing, Triple Zero Custodian officials expressed surprise at the timeline senior Telstra executives detailed earlier in the day.
Triple Zero Custodian first assistant secretary Clare Chapple said she had made notes about Telstra executives claiming they were aware of a spike of welfare checks to customers at 6:30am on Wednesday last week.
Despite Telstra detecting those events early in the morning, the custodian was notified by Telstra of the outage at 7:14am.
"That 7:14am email was the first email that we received, although I have heard Telstra's evidence just before that there were a number of indicators earlier than that," Ms Chapple said.
Assistant secretary Jennie Hood told the hearing that the Custodian's duty officer alerted the agency shortly after 7am after noticing her own Telstra phone was not working.
The duty officer then checked the crowdsourced outage report website Downdetector and "actually text messaged some Telstra contacts to confirm if what we were seeing was an indication of a major outage, and it kind of proceeded from there".
Regulator ACMA, which is investigating the outage, also appeared at the hearing. It has the power to issue notices to Telstra to request information.
Telstra could face a $30 million penalty for its failure, the hearing was told.
Supplied material courtesy of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, thanks to our pilot partnership.
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