Brady apologised for letting customers and the Australian public down.<\/p>\n
\u201cI \u2026 understand the broader impact on the community when services go down, from things like payments to transport,\u201d she said on Friday.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s extremely frustrating and disruptive when services aren\u2019t available, and I am sorry for the impact that this has had on so many people.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wednesday\u2019s outage was caused by a software fault with Telstra\u2019s time-telling systems, which then told the rest of its network that it was November 2006<\/a>. This lead to what one expert said would be a \u201cdigital domino chain fall\u201d that brought the network down in minutes in the early hours of Wednesday morning.<\/p>\n The ABC reported<\/a> on Friday Telstra was warned by the government\u2019s Cyber and Infrastructure Security Centre of the critical nature of its time-keeping services on keeping infrastructure operational.<\/p>\n Brady said work was being carried out on a time-keeping node when it reset, and it didn\u2019t have the correct time when it restarted.<\/p>\n She said timing systems were \u201cvery well-known\u201d and \u201ccritical\u201d in mobile networks, but could not say why backup systems did not prevent the outage.<\/p>\n \u201cOur network is built with a lot of redundancy put in place, and that will be part of this investigation,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Sign up for the Breaking News Australia email<\/a><\/p>\n The communications minister, Anika Wells, said on Friday that as the issue had been resolve, it was now \u201ctime for Telstra to face the music\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cTelstra has a lot of questions to answer,\u201d she said. \u201cWe need to get the bottom of what happened. We need to understand how to prevent it happening again.\u201d<\/p>\n The Australian Communications and Media Authority (Acma) will conduct an investigation into the outage, and the telco can face civil penalties of up to $30m if found to be in breach of its legal and regulatory obligations under powers boosted after the Optus 2025 triple zero outage.<\/p>\n Telstra is not the first company to encounter this issue. A telco in Jersey suffered a similar outage in 2020<\/a> that lasted hours, took out emergency call functions for some customers on the Channel island, and took nearly five days to fully recover services.<\/p>\n According to the investigation from that outage, the telco\u2019s time server generated the wrong date \u2013 November 2000 \u2013 nearly 20 years earlier. The incorrect date was passed on to routers in the network that then isolated themselves from the network.<\/p>\n \u201cHaving lost around half of the network, inherent resilience was lost which ultimately led to the outage across the entire JT network,\u201d a report found.<\/p>\n![\"Telstra](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/1783660451_805_5000.jpg\")
Telstra CEO Vicki Brady faces questions on nationwide outage \u2013 video<\/p>\n
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