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July 9, 2026 — 11:58am
On Wednesday afternoon, Telstra’s chief financial officer Michael Ackland stood at a lectern and declared: mission accomplished. The network was fully back online. Only, a couple of hours later, it became clear that it wasn’t. A late night social media post informed users that some calls to Triple Zero still weren’t getting through.
One major outage at the nation’s largest telecommunications company can be characterised as bad luck. Two in 24 hours looks more like a pattern – or a blunder.
Telstra’s chief executive Vicki Brady, who has been holidaying overseas can’t get back fast enough to deal with the escalating crisis. She’s still not home.
The good news is that the company has successfully dealt with the majority of both issues – the bad news it that it has still not publicly explained the root cause of the first problem, or released any details about what triggered the second. Was it a recurrence of the first? Some lurking issue that was cloaked by the initial outage? Did some attempt to fix the first cause the second?
We don’t know.
The hangover from Wednesday’s communications chaos is still affecting commuter and freight rail services. Businesses are counting the cost of being unable to take digital payments for extended hours.
No longer will Telstra be able to estimate that those affected numbered into the thousands, which already strained credulity given the telco has about 25 million active retail mobile services. This second issue will swell those numbers, elevate the damage and lengthen the long tail of consequences.
But it is the compromised access to Triple Zero emergency services that escalates this kind of infrastructure outage into a full-blown disaster. The company on Wednesday said more than 300 Triple Zero calls had failed and that the fallback mechanism that should see these calls default to the Optus or TPG networks, didn’t work in every instance. Customers required welfare checks.
There are unconfirmed reports from the office of South Australian Liberal senator Kerrynne Liddle that there had been a death linked to Wednesday’s outage.
Meanwhile in Brady’s absence, Telstra’s Ackland has had to again apologise to the myriad of consumers, businesses and commuters for whom Telstra’s problems have been responsible for all manner of disruption.
The government has been restrained in its response to Telstra – resisting the urge to call for executive heads to roll.
But there will be fresh pressure on legislators to make the telecommunications giant accountable and review why changes already made to the Triple Zero network, including the establishment of a custodian for those services, were not bulletproof.
Already there has been talk about compensation for affected customers, particularly businesses that lost revenue due to the outage.
Optus paid a penalty of only $12 million for its major outage that affected after more than 2000 customers were unable to call Triple Zero, but compensation was negligible. In Telstra’s case it could be up for tens of million of dollars in penalties.
The telecommunications industry ombudsman, Cynthia Gebert, encouraged consumers to contact the regulator if people don’t receive a satisfactory outcome from the company.
Meanwhile, Carol Bennett, the chief executive of the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network told the ABC that the Telstra fine should be very significant.
“It is not a minor outage – this is a huge national issue, and we need to treat it that way.
“And I think there does need to be significant penalties when businesses fail like this, particularly when they’re the custodians of Australian safety.”
The longer term and more impactful consequence for Telstra will be the potential inability to claim and profit from the superiority of its network.
Customers pay a premium for Telstra over Optus and Vodafone because of its reliability and coverage.
According to public relations expert Associate Professor Katharina Wolf, from Curtin Business School, the outage put Australia’s biggest telco’s reputation for reliability under fresh scrutiny.
“For years, Telstra has promised Australians reliability, reach and premium network performance — a position that became even more important after the Optus outage. When its own network fails, reportedly because of something as routine as time-synchronisation, the reputation damage is magnified.
“For businesses, remote workers and essential services, this outage highlights the risk of relying on a single terrestrial carrier. It also hands [Elon Musk’s internet service] Starlink reputation and marketing equity without the company having to spend a dollar, reframing satellite connectivity from a costly rural alternative into a credible backup for resilience, continuity and critical services.”
The problems for Telstra won’t be finished when the engineers restore full services. There is a long tail to come.
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