‘People could have lost their lives’: Telstra’s apologies fail to quell outage anger

Fallout over the telco’s latest national outage continues, with executives called to front a snap meeting of a triple-zero parliamentary inquiry Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast It was a missed message on Microsoft Teams and a voicemail from Telstra’s head of operations that brought the chief executive’s European summer holiday with family to a grinding halt. Vicki Brady returned to Australia on Friday to face a media firestorm over Telstra’s national mobile outage, and on Saturday it was announced the company would soon face a grilling in the Senate. At 7am Sydney time on Wednesday, Brady was informed Telstra’s mobile network had suffered a major outage, affecting millions of customers, taking some train services offline, stopping some EV chargers working, preventing shops from being able to use Eftpos, and some customers being able to call triple zero. Brady’s holiday interruption came two and a half hours after the outage began and after Telstra had publicly confirmed the issue and had alerted the federal government. Standing before reporters after landing back in Sydney on Friday morning, Brady confirmed the outage was caused by a software