News and politics live updates: Telstra bosses face grilling at senate inquiry after outage

We’re wrapping up our live blog for the day but we’re still updating The Nightly website so stick around!

Thousands of customers have already lodged compensation claims following Telstra’s widespread outage, with payouts now underway.

Telstra customers are already trying to claw money back from the outage.

Chief Financial Officer Michael Ackland told the hearing that “so far, as of a few hours ago, we’d received a little bit over 8,000 claims.”

“We are working through with the rest, where there’s further evidence or other things that they want to talk through where they want different compensation.

“So we’ve gone with speed in terms of particularly those goodwill credits where people have said, it was a challenge and, that, that compensation. None of the large ones have been done yet.

“So we’re working through the larger ones as we go forward. So no, nothing as yet. Double figures tops. Triple figures.”

Telstra’s CFO said that as of a few hours ago, the telco has received a total of more than eight thousand claims and that the company has paid a little over $100,000 in total.

“We are working through the rest,” CFO Michael Ackland said.

“None of the large” claims have been paid yet, he explained.

Senator Hanson-Young asked how Telstra expects to compensate the more than 8 million customers that have been contacted, pointing to cash or credit.

CEO Vicki Brady said that it will likely be credit.

“It will vary,” she said. ‘[But we expect] the majority of customers will be in credit.”

Chief executive Vicki Brady said Telstra has written to about 8 million consumer and small business customers about the impact the outage has had on them.

We are in “early stages” of how much it will cost, she said in response to the question by Senator Sarah Hanson-Young about costing.

“That’s what we’re working through.”

Senator Sarah Hanson-Young has labelled Telstra “smug” as its bosses try dodge questions about the telco’s reliability.

“And you’re all pretty smug about it,” the Senator said.

“Oh, that’s an Optus problem.

“Well, I’m sorry, today we see it’s not an Optus problem.

“It’s also a Telstra problem.

“So when you’re banking huge increases in profit, there are more outages, less reliability for people to access and use their mobile phone.

“I just don’t think it’s, I don’t think it washes, to go around telling people that your system is resilient.

“It’s clearly not.”

When chief executive Vicki Brady was pushed by Labor senator Helen Polley, the Telstra boss could not rule out any more outages.

“Our job is to make sure we are taking the actions and we are taking those steps that will mitigate as best we can,” she said.

“I would love to be able to sit here and say there will be zero outages. The reality of a complex network environment, with fast evolving technology, you just can’t, no telco around the world could guarantee that.

“But absolutely, we accept here that it wasn’t good enough. Our controls and our processes definitely let us down, and that impacted a lot of people, and we are deeply sorry for that.”

Upgrades to Telstra’s hardware would have cost about $30,000.

The telco had reportedly known about it since 2022 and were reminded in January of this year, the Senate hearing was told.

“The manufacturer warned you about this, and you thought better,” Senator Sarah Hanson-Young said.

Telstra chief executive Vicki Brady said an investigation was underway into the telco’s failure to upgrade the equipment.

“It’s unacceptable that we had an outage that resulted from this,” she said.

When asked by Senator Hanson-Young if the outage could have been avoided if the software been updated, Gerard Tracey said yes.

“A newer piece of hardware, operating in the same design that we intended to… the issue wouldn’t have happened,” he said.

Telstra was warned by the manufacturer of possible hardware problems several times.

Senator Sarah Hanson-Young said the company had “had this for 15 years”.

“There was definitely a reminder in January of this year that this update needed to be done,” Gerard Tracey said in response.

“We believe it does go back several years, that it was there.

“And to provide some context, our investigation so far has shown that the teams, it’s not a case of them just ignoring that update.

“They did consider it. The way this was designed and the way we were using this particular server and this card, this update was affecting a feature that we were not using at that time.

“However, as I spoke to, we made a design change on this particular server to address another issue which meant that became relevant.

“We didn’t document that design change, and we hadn’t implemented then the software update.”

Telstra’s CEO had admitted to senators the telco’s controls were not adequate and proper softwareupdates could prevented the outage from happening.

“Had that software update been completed, or had the design change been properly documented and reflected in the maintenance procedures, the outage may not have occurred,” Ms Brady said.

“This is clearly unacceptable.

“If maintenance work can trigger this kind of outage, it suggests our controls were not good enough.

“We are accountable for that, and our external expert investigation will address why that design change was not documented.”