Telstra CEO to face Senate over outage

In Short:
– Telstra CEO Vicki Brady and CFO Michael Ackland will attend a Senate inquiry on a national outage affecting emergency calls.
– Over 600 calls failed during the outage, prompting scrutiny and potential fines up to $30 million.

Telstra CEO Vicki Brady and CFO Michael Ackland will appear before a Senate inquiry on Friday regarding a national outage that disrupted emergency calls to triple-0.More than 600 calls failed during the outage last Wednesday, prompting the inquiry and the possibility of fines up to $30 million from Labor.

Telstra faces scrutiny

Formal invitations are pending, but Ms Brady, who cut her leave short, is expected to attend alongside Mr Ackland, who managed the crisis in her absence.

In a letter to customers, Brady apologised for the outage caused by a malfunctioning software update that led to time synchronisation errors.

Telstra’s new network head, Kim Krogh Andersen, may also join the inquiry; he recently took over after a merger of Telstra’s technology teams.

The software issue rewound digital clocks by 20 years, causing failures across the network.

The hardware involved, which costs less than $30,000, has been out of production for a decade, and upgrading all affected units could total hundreds of millions of dollars.

Brady asserted that Telstra has invested significantly in network resilience and is committed to accountability.

Warnings about potential failures will be central to both Telstra’s and the Senate’s investigations.

Communications Minister Anika Wells highlighted previous outages from major telcos, insisting that accountability for the latest incident is necessary.

Claims linking the outage to a death have been dismissed by police, and Brady has contacted the affected family to offer condolences.

The Australian Communications Consumer Action Network is advocating for enforceable reliability standards for telcos and a national outage register.

Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young and independent MP Helen Haines are calling for stronger regulations to prevent future service disruptions.