Telstra shareholders will get their chance to grill executives about a nationwide outage that tarnished the firm’s reputation as Australia’s top mobile operator.
The telco giant holds its annual meeting in Sydney on Tuesday, when the July incident is expected to be high on the agenda.
The outage disrupted everything from public transport networks to EFTPOS systems, along with hundreds of triple zero calls.
An external review by Technology Audit Partners found the disruption was primarily the result of Telstra not treating network timing as a critical capability that required the highest levels of oversight.
The outage began in the early hours of the morning after a planned change to a timing chassis in Melbourne triggered rolling network failures due to an incorrect internal date being set.
Ownership for network timing issues wasn’t sufficiently defined and there was insufficient technical expertise on hand to deal with the problem when it arose, the report found.
The outage sparked a Senate inquiry and an ongoing investigation by the Australian Communications and Media Authority.
In response, Telstra’s board reduced chief executive Vicki Brady’s pay package by $607,000 for 2025/26, taking her total compensation to $6.8 million.
It also docked the short-term incentive pay of nine other senior executives by a total of $1.3 million.
But the board also complimented Ms Brady on her overall performance for the year, while the Australian Shareholders Association intends to vote in favour of her pay packet.
“Telstra produced a solid financial result in FY26 with incremental increases in profit, earnings per share and dividend,” the association noted.
The July outage and the implications of the external review was the “key issue” before the meeting, it added.
Jacki Neumann, head of capital markets at investing platform Sharesies, said Telstra’s use of artificial intelligence was also likely to come up at the meeting.
“Investors have heard a lot about AI, the energy transition and long-term growth plans, and now they want to see those investments showing up in earnings, efficiency or shareholder returns,” she said.
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