Telstra executives have told a Senate inquiry that a software update that could have prevented last week’s 000 outage didn’t go ahead. Photo: Michelle Kroll.
Telstra’s massive network outage that shut down access to Triple Zero around the country last week was the fault of software not being updated and maintenance teams not being aware of a design change.
Telstra executives fronted an urgently convened Senate inquiry on Friday (17 July) and offered that explanation for why the outages occurred.
The telco’s chief executive officer, Vicky Brady, first used her appearance to offer an apology.
“Last week, Telstra let Australians down, we let our customers down, we let the community down, and we fell short of what people rightly expect from us,” she said.
“For this, I am deeply sorry. 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.”
Ms Brady said the outages last Wednesday (8 July) initially affected almost half of all calls and data usage on Telstra’s mobile network, but by 10 am, most were working correctly.
“By 4 pm, the initial issue we had identified had been addressed,” she said.
“At its peak, this initial issue impacted approximately 45 per cent of all calls and data sessions on our mobile network.”
In the identified cases, callers received error messages, and some phones also attempted to connect to an alternative mobile network.
The server that failed Telstra is called SSU 2000 and would cost $30,000 to replace.
It was manufactured in 2011, but Telstra executives told the inquiry that the hardware wasn’t the problem; rather, it was a software update the company had not applied.
That outage could have been avoided if the update had happened when maintenance workers reset the server some years ago.
In 2022 and again in January this year, Telstra was alerted by the server’s manufacturer that a software update was required, but Telstra took no action to ensure it was applied.
In its submission to the inquiry, Telstra said the outage occurred after a team carried out maintenance work in accordance with the correct procedures, but something went wrong.
“The NTP server in Exhibition St had an underlying software configuration such that when the device restarted, it reset the date to 2006,” Telstra said.
“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.”
In response to questions from the Senate committee, Ms Brady suggested that network outages should be expected.
She said mobile networks were complex and evolving and certainly not infallible.
“I would love to be able to sit here and say there will be zero outages,” Ms Brady said.
“The reality of a complex network environment with fast-evolving technology, you just can’t.
“No telco around the world could guarantee that. But absolutely, we accept here that it wasn’t good enough. Our controls and our processes definitely let us down, and that impacted a lot of people, and we are deeply sorry for that.”
Committee chair, Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young, described Telstra’s attitude in an earlier hearing over last year’s Optus outages as “pretty smug”.
Telstra said at the time that it was an “Optus problem” and Senator Hanson-Young reminded the executives of that.
“Well, I’m sorry. Today we see it’s not an Optus problem. It’s also a Telstra problem,” she said.
“So when you’re banking huge increases in profit, there are more outages, less reliability for people to access and use their mobile phones.
“I just don’t think it washes to go around telling people that your system is resilient. It’s clearly not.”
Senator Sarah Hanson-Young used the hearing to point out that Telstra had reported 3641 outages in 2024 and 5221 in 2025.
The telco reported a profit of $2.3 billion in 2025, a 31 per cent increase on the previous financial year.
Original Article published by Chris Johnson on Region Canberra.
