One Telstra outage is unlucky, but two in 24 hours? That looks like a pattern

July 9, 2026 — 11:58am

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On Wednesday afternoon, Telstra’s chief financial officer Michael Ackland stood at a lectern and declared: mission accomplished. The network was fully back online. Only, a couple of hours later, it became clear that it wasn’t. A late night social media post informed users that some calls to Triple Zero still weren’t getting through.

One major outage at the nation’s largest telecommunications company can be characterised as bad luck. Two in 24 hours looks more like a pattern – or a blunder.

Telstra’s chief executive Vicki Brady, who has been holidaying overseas can’t get back fast enough to deal with the escalating crisis. She’s still not home.

The good news is that the company has successfully dealt with the majority of both issues – the bad news it that it has still not publicly explained the root cause of the first problem, or released any details about what triggered the second. Was it a recurrence of the first? Some lurking issue that was cloaked by the initial outage? Did some attempt to fix the first cause the second?

Elderly people unable to get help after Telstra’s Triple Zero failures

The hangover from Wednesday’s........

© The Sydney Morning Herald