The Triple Zero emergency service is a cornerstone of public safety, connecting callers directly to police, fire and ambulance services. But days after Telstra lost connection, not only once but twice, the telco is struggling to paper over the cracks of a massive failure.
The outage rippled across the nation, interrupting the daily lives of millions: public transport commuters were stranded, people were unable to make phone calls or pay for small businesses purchases, and, most seriously of all, hundreds of calls to Triple Zero failed to connect.
While the outage does not appear to have led to a South Australian woman’s death, as earlier feared, chief political correspondent Paul Sakkal reports that the woman’s family was devastated after her husband was unable to tell relatives that she had been rushed to hospital.
Chaos and confusion mounted as the telco attributed the outage to a software defect and time desynchronisation in network GPS nodes, discussed welfare checks for Triple Zero calls, and said little else. The Communication Workers Union claimed job cuts were to blame. Meanwhile, Australians wondered what to do if Triple Zero crashed again.
On Friday Telstra’s chief executive, Vicki Brady, cut short her European holiday to fly home to take charge. “We have let our customers and Australians down and for that, I am deeply sorry,” she said. “Any issue connecting a Triple Zero call is a big issue. In this case, that is unacceptable. But our back-up processes worked.”
Yet, there is little reason to have faith in the processes: Australians have heard this kind of telco double-talk before.
In late 2023, Optus’ bungled handling of the failure of its national mobile and internet network led to the resignation of chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin. The telco was fined $12 million after a 12-hour outage in which 2000-odd Triple Zero calls failed, and it didn’t conduct required welfare checks of more than 300 callers.
The Optus fumble prompted the Bean review, which made 18 recommendations to improve the Triple Zero system. These were all supported by the federal government, which directed the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) to require mobile carriers to take all reasonable steps to ensure emergency calls can be carried on any available network during an outage.
Then last September, Optus’ Triple Zero emergency service broke down for 13 hours and the deaths of two people were linked to the inability to make emergency calls.
And yet, here we are once again.
Brady, who has run Telstra since 2022 and was paid a salary of $6.7 million in 2025, would not be drawn on whether executives would forgo bonuses over the outage, saying the board oversaw remuneration. Telstra’s nine-person leadership team earns $28 million. Brady said queries about whether Telstra’s redundancy systems had worked as intended would form part of the investigation.
The telco’s mishandling of the outage suggests it has learnt little from Optus’ faulty history. It also undermines the public’s faith in Telstra for neglecting the truism that Triple Zero is a matter of life and death, and Australians must be able to trust it.
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