Telstra CEO Vicki Brady has admitted that the company received warnings, possibly dating back to 2022, about a potential server issue that ultimately resulted in the massive service outage affecting millions of Australian customers on July 8.
During a recent inquiry hearing into triple zero service outage, Brady said the July 8 outage was caused by design change on a server that was not properly documented.
“When the device was powered on, a GPS card within it did not operate as expected,” Brady told the Senate’s Environment and Communications References Committee.
“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 the update been completed, or had the design change been documented and reflected in the maintenance procedures, the outage may not have occurred.”
Telstra’s executives acknowledged that the need to update the GPS card had been noted in January this year and that warnings may even have dated back to 2022, but the fix was not applied because the update related to a feature the company was not using at the time.
When asked by committee chair Sarah Hanson-Young whether Telstra had been aware for at least six months that the server was not functioning as it should, Brady said the company became aware of the issue during its investigation into the outage.
Need For Change
Brady admitted that Telstra needed to strengthen its controls so that “known risks are captured, prioritised, and resolved before they can affect customers.”
“We invest significantly in the resilience of our network and in modernising it as technology evolves. But this incident shows we have more work to do,” she said.
Hanson-Young pointed out that reported outages across the overall network had risen to 5,221 in 2025, up from 3,641 in 2024.
“Why are we getting more of them [outages] when Australians are relying on their mobile phone service more than ever?” she asked.
Brady pointed to causes such as cyclones, bushfires, and power interruptions from other sources as the main causes of outages, and said Telstra was focused on improving the resilience of its network.
However, Hanson-Young said the triple zero outage last week “proves that to be an absolute furphy.”
“You’re banking huge increases in profit [and] 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,” she said.
Compensation Claims Coming In
Telstra has written to 8.8 million consumer and small business customers to enquire about the impact the outage had on them and will determine their eligibility for compensation based on their responses.
Brady said most people would receive compensation as a credit because it was the fastest and most effective way to provide it to customers, but it was too early to say how much the disruption had cost them.
The telco’s executives told the Committee that approximately 45 percent of all calls and data sessions on Telstra’s mobile network had been affected at the worst point during the outage.
In addition, there was an increase of around 6,000 extra calls to triple zero during the outage, with the vast majority hanging up after hearing the recorded announcement. Telstra attributed that to people testing the service after seeing media reports rather than actual emergencies.
According to the company’s analysis, actual call volumes to police and other emergency services on the day of the outage were comparable to those recorded in the preceding two weeks.
