Telstra Senate inquiry LIVE updates: execs grilled over outage

ACMA may seek civil penalties in court against Telstra, hearing wraps By Elias Visontay Officials from the telecommunications regulator, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), have told the hearing that they are expecting a trove of information from Telstra about the outage to be delivered by early August. ACMA chair Nerida O’Loughlin also said that if the regulator’s investigation determined the events that led to and occurred on the day of Telstra’s outage included significant regulatory breaches, it would have the ability to ask the Federal Court to impose civil penalties on Telstra. The maximum penalty amount would be up to $30 million per contravention. “Once we have established if there are areas of non-compliance, then we would turn our mind to what is the best enforcement action,” O’Loughlin said. The hearing wrapped up a short time later. Thank you for reading our live coverage of the hearing. Latest Posts 3.05pm Triple Zero Custodian surprised at Telstra’s timeline By Elias Visontay Triple Zero Custodian officials have expressed surprise at the timeline that senior Telstra executives detailed before the Senate committee hearing earlier this afternoon about the network’s outage. After Telstra executives including chief executive Vicki Brady finished their appearance, officials from the government department and regulator fronted the hearing. There, 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, and an increase in connectivity of emergency calls camping on, also known as using emergency roaming, that morning. Despite Telstra detecting those events at 6:30AM, the custodian was only officially notified by Telstra of the outage at 7:14AM. Dr Jennie Hood, assistant secretary at the custodian, then told senators that its own duty officer who monitors networks first alerted the agency after noticing her own Telstra phone wasn’t working shortly after 7AM. The duty officer then checked the crowdsourced outage report website DownDetector.com.au – which Telstra executives also admitted to checking on the morning of the outage – and promptly “messaged some Telstra contacts to confirm if what we were seeing was an indication of a major outage”, Hood said. “The duty officer actually looked at DownDetector and did observe that one of the comments on there was that someone could not contact Triple Zero,” Hood said. She added that shortly after, she contacted a Telstra government relations person, and received an invitation to a meeting a short time later. 2.38pm Senate pauses ahead of ACMA testimony after marathon Telstra grilling By David Swan The Senate committee has paused for five minutes ahead of ACMA’s appearance, following an extended session of testimony from Telstra chief executive Vicki Brady and her team. In a final exchange before the break, Telstra’s Triple Zero team told the inquiry there was a spike of roughly 6000 extra calls to the emergency service during the outage, with the vast majority dropping off after the recorded announcement – which Telstra believes were people testing the service after watching media coverage rather than genuine emergencies. The company said its analysis found genuine call volumes connected to police and other emergency services were similar to the previous two Wednesdays. Key highlights from the hearing so far: Telstra confirmed the failed device was an SSU 2000 , manufactured by Symmetricom (now Microchip), and conceded the outage’s initial issue affected 45 per cent of all calls and data sessions on its mobile network at its peak. The company confirmed the server cost about $30,000 , and that a firmware update flagged by the manufacturer as far back as 2020 , again in 2022 , and again in January this year , was never applied. Technical executive Gerard Tracey told the committee newer hardware “operating in the same design that we intended to” would have meant “the issue wouldn’t have happened” – the clearest concession yet that the outage was avoidable. Telstra rejected suggestions outsourcing was to blame, saying the maintenance work was carried out by its own internal Melbourne team with no staff cuts. Brady confirmed Telstra has written to 8.8 million consumer and small business customers, but ruled out automatic blanket compensation, saying most payouts will probably come as bill credit rather than cash. Telstra conceded it has no way of knowing whether medical alert devices that failed to place a Triple Zero call during the outage went unnoticed, since its welfare-check process only covers calls that were initiated and failed. Brady called for the universal service obligation to be “modernised” but stopped short of committing to bringing mobile services under binding reliability standards. 2.16pm Complaints website and social media relied on as indication of outage By Elias Visontay Telstra said it monitors the crowd-sourced outage report website DownDetector.com.au as well as social media analysis for indications of issues with its own network. Gerard Tracey, group owner, end-to-end service performance and resilience, is being asked about how the company was first alerted to customer issues in the early hours of Wednesday last week when its nationwide outage occurred. “We do monitor the down detector, which is a social media based analysis, and we received an alert of an uptick of Telstra being mentioned in social media. That was a key indication,” Tracey said. “We did have an alert when we hit 100 reports on social media.” 1.56pm More than $100,000 in compensation already paid out, in credit only By Elias Visontay Telstra has already paid out more than $100,000 in compensation to “many, many thousands” of claimants, but only in credit. Chief financial officer Michael Ackland said that as of a few hours ago there had been just more than 8000 compensation claims lodged by customers, of which several thousand had been paid out in credit. The highest value claims so far were in the triple digits, he said. But he said “none of the large ones” have been processed yet. The sum of the compensation paid so far was “a little bit over $100,000” he said. “But it is very, very early days is our view.” 1.49pm Telstra rejects automatic compensation payouts By David Swan Telstra chief executive Vicki Brady has confirmed the company wrote to 8.8 million consumer and small business customers over last week’s outage, but told the Senate inquiry she does not expect all of them to receive compensation, and defended Telstra’s decision against an automatic payout for everyone affected. Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young pressed Brady on why Telstra had not offered blanket compensation as a gesture of goodwill, with a separate process for customers who were more heavily affected. Brady said Telstra had considered a blanket amount but judged it fairer for the worst-affected customers to come forward individually, adding that other companies which had used blanket compensation had faced criticism for it. Brady said she expected most compensation would be issued as a credit to customers’ bills rather than cash, saying credit was “the most effective and quickest way” to process it, though the amount Telstra will end up paying out remains unclear. “It will just depend how quickly customers come forward and lodge [claims] with us,” she said. 1.45pm CEO defends internally-led investigation into outage By Elias Visontay Vicki Brady has defended Telstra’s move to internally lead its investigation into its outage instead of having it conducted entirely externally, as Optus did for its outage last year. “We’re conducting our investigation, and then we have appointed an external expert to work with us. This is a particularly detailed technical issue, and we need very specific expertise to help us understand exactly what’s happened and looked at the detailed procedures,” she said. In response to a question on whether such an investigation could effectively examine internal cultural problem that led to the outage, Brady said: “The experts we’re bringing in, where their expertise lies, is very much in understanding and assessing outages and root cause. “They will work through technically what happened. They have the ability to work with our technical teams to understand why processes weren’t documented, why choices were made not to update software, and so we think they’re the best positioned because we want to get absolutely to the bottom of this,” she said. 1.40pm Telstra has written to almost 9 million customers, but can’t yet say what outage cost them By David Swan Telstra has written to just under 9 million customers following last week’s outage, chief executive Vicki Brady told the Senate inquiry, but the company cannot yet say how much the disruption has cost customers or the broader economy. Brady said the outage’s impact was intermittent rather than universal, and that Telstra’s communication to the nearly 9 million affected had set out a clear process for customers to report how they were affected. Pressed by Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young on whether Telstra had any current estimate of the cost to customers, Brady said the company was in the early stages of that process. Telstra chief executive Vicki Brady says the company is not aware of any life-threatening outcomes as a result of the outage. AAP Hanson-Young also asked whether Telstra had sought any analysis of the outage’s broader cost to the economy, given tens of thousands of people were unable to reach trains for two days. Brady said she had not asked for an economic cost analysis, though the company was working with affected organisations including the rail operators. 1.28pm ‘Absolute furphy’: Senator blasts Telstra CEO over resilience claim By Elias Visontay Greens senator and committee chair Sarah Hanson-Young has pushed Telstra chief executive Vicki Brady on statistics showing the telco’s network is suffering increasing outages, citing 3641 instances reported in 2024 up to 5221 in 2025. Brady said “certain things in a year can affect it” and that weather events such as cyclones and bushfires are a key factor. “The single biggest cause of outages on our network relates to power, and so there is absolutely a reliance on making sure that we get continuity and consistency of power,” she added. Brady then began speaking of Telstra’s investment in its network in the last 12 months to achieve “better resilience”. This and a subsequent mention of “resilience” from Brady appears to infuriate Hanson-Young. “Last week proves that to be an absolute furphy, Ms Brady,” Hanson-Young said. “Since September last year. All of the warning signs were there, and I remember having you and your representatives before this committee, knowing that Optus had had this terrible outage, and you’re all pretty smug about it. ‘Oh, that’s an Optus problem’. Well, I’m sorry, today we see it’s not an Optus problem, it’s also a Telstra problem. “So when you’re banking huge increases in profit, there are more outages, less reliability for people to access and use their mobile phone. I don’t think it washes to go around telling people that your system’s resilient. It’s clearly not,” the senator said. 1.27pm Telstra concedes gap in tracking medical device Triple Zero failures By David Swan Telstra has confirmed it has no way of knowing whether medical alert devices that rely on its network failed to reach help during last week’s outage, after Nationals senator Ross Cadell raised concerns the company’s welfare check process would not have caught cases where a device failed silently. Cadell asked whether someone who pressed a medical alert button during the outage, expecting it to trigger a Triple Zero call, could have gone unnoticed if the call never initiated. Telstra chief executive Vicki Brady confirmed the telco’s welfare check process is specifically built around failed Triple Zero calls, and that some medical devices generate an alert to a third-party provider rather than placing a direct call, meaning a device that failed to connect at all would not necessarily be identified or checked by Telstra. Brady said where a device does initiate a Triple Zero call and that call fails on its network, Telstra would be able to identify and follow up on it. 1 of 3