Telstra has broken a critical rule of corporate crisis management

July 8, 2026 — 4:00pm

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If there’s one lesson we learned from the Optus outage last year, it’s that the difference between a corporate crisis and a corporate calamity depends in large part on how it’s communicated.

Telstra’s outage response on Wednesday was conducted well in some ways, but poorly in others. The scale of the disruption was the first problem. It threw train timetables in Australia’s two major cities into varying degrees of chaos and left many merchants unable to take digital payments, to say nothing of vast numbers of consumers unable to use their mobile phones for calls or data.

Where Telstra did appear to do well was in its ability to restore 90 per cent of services within about six hours.

But, much like Optus’ decision to take days to reveal the full scale of its disastrous Triple Zero outage, it was in transparency that Telstra let itself down. There should be no minimising the level of chaos when the company’s........

© The Sydney Morning Herald