Telstra to face Senate inquiry over nationwide outage as $30 million fine looms

Telstra executives will be forced to front a Senate inquiry as early as next week over the nationwide outage that blocked emergency calls, grounded trains and stalled payments across the country.

The telco is now under investigation by the Federal Government and the Australian Communications and Media Authority, and faces fines of up to $30 million.

The outage struck about 4.30am on July 8, hitting a company that powers roughly 25 million Australian mobile services.

By 10am, just less than 90 per cent of calls and data had been restored, with the network fully recovered by 4pm.

Telstra chief financial officer Michael Ackland said the cause was a software defect in time-keeping servers at data centres in Sydney and Melbourne.

Those servers keep time synchronised across the network — timing that mobile connectivity and data transmission depend on.

The damage went well beyond dropped calls.

Victoria’s entire regional V/Line train network ground to a halt, with services stopped dead on the tracks and passengers told to avoid travelling.

Bank transactions timed out. Mobile virtual network operators including Boost, Belong, Aldi Mobile and Tangerine also went down.

Most seriously, hundreds of Triple Zero calls failed.

Telstra carried out 333 welfare checks on customers whose emergency calls were unsuccessful or dropped after connecting.

“The volume of these welfare checks was higher than we expected,” Mr Ackland said.

“We let customers down today in their hour of need. We apologise for that deeply.”

Chief executive Vicki Brady spoke to the family of an elderly South Australian woman who died during the disruption.

Telstra and SA Police concluded the outage was not responsible for her death, but Ms Brady offered her condolences to family members who could not contact each other when their loved one became unwell.

The crisis has sharpened scrutiny of the company’s cost-cutting.

In May, Telstra sacked more than 100 people and merged two of its largest technology divisions. Ms Brady denied the job cuts had affected quality control.

Communications Minister Anika Wells pledged to “hold Telstra’s feet to the fire”.

“There’s a reason telcos are the least trusted industries in Australia,” Ms Wells said. “It’s because of days like today.”

She said there was a large gap between the way the industry had been regulated for 30 years and what a modern customer expects.

Federal minister Jason Clare welcomed the scrutiny.

“People could have lost their lives and that’s why there’s an investigation by ACMA,” he said. “They’re liable to some very serious financial penalties for what’s happened here.”

Telstra has 45 days to report to the regulator. The civil penalties it faces were introduced by the government after the 2025 Optus outage, which ran for almost 14 hours, left hundreds unable to call Triple Zero and was linked to two deaths.

The Greens have promised to drag the company before the inquiry and to legislate reliability standards.

“We will force Telstra to front the Senate inquiry and explain why this happened,” communications spokesperson Sarah Hanson-Young said, “including the impacts of cost-cutting and offshoring of services.”

She said the regulator had failed: “ACMA has become a lapdog, not a watchdog.”

It is not the first time Telstra has been here.

The company was fined more than $3 million in 2024 over an outage that stopped customers calling Triple Zero. That incident was resolved in about 90 minutes, but a Victorian man died after his family’s emergency calls were delayed during his cardiac arrest.

Opposition leader Angus Taylor and One Nation’s Barnaby Joyce have called for an investigation into whether this outage was linked to China’s ballistic missile testing earlier that week.

Telstra has told the government it has found no evidence the failure was malicious.

Based on reporting by the ABC, SBS, AAP and 9News, and a media release from the Australian Greens.