In Brief
- Telstra's CEO has spoken following the mass outage that hit the telco on Wednesday.
- She denied job redundancies led to the national outage.
Telstra has provided a formal notice to the Triple Zero custodian that the outage has been resolved, federal Communications Minister Anika Wells has confirmed.
Wells said the welfare checks that have been referred as a result of Telstra's Triple Zero outage have completed, and she said there was "no adverse outcome associated with those referrals".
Meanwhile, Wells said Telstra "has a lot of questions to answer".
"It going to take Telstra a lot of work and a lot of time to rebuild that trust with Australians," she said, adding that the Albanese government "will hold them to account".
Earlier on Friday, Telstra said there was no "active outage" in an area where a woman died in South Australia during the telco's outage on Wednesday. The outage caused disruptions to calls to Triple Zero.
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Telstra chief financial officer Michael Ackland said on Friday the telco has found no records of Telstra mobile numbers associated with the address where the woman died to the Triple Zero platforms.
"We also confirm there were no active outages affecting the local area at that time, and our records show good mobile signal strength at that location," he said.
Ackland said Telstra found a related call was "successfully made to 000 from another number", which correctly connected the caller to the relevant emergency service.
South Australian police said on Wednesday they were investigating a death in the state, after Liberal senator Kerrynne Liddle linked it to the Telstra outage.
Police had earlier said in a social media comment on Liddle's page they were not aware of any deaths during the outage.
Liddle then criticised the state's police minister for questioning her integrity, saying the family of the deceased person reported the incident to police on Thursday, after her office received the report.
In a media statement on Friday afternoon, South Australia Police said the suggestion the woman had died following a failed Triple Zero call was incorrect.
It said the woman's partner had found her unresponsive following a medical episode and called a neighbour who had medical experience on his Telstra mobile. The neighbour rang Triple Zero on her Telstra mobile for an ambulance and the woman was taken by ambulance to hospital, where she later died.
Police said the woman's partner had later reported being unable to contact relatives on his phone while at the hospital and this may have been misinterpreted and led to the incorrect claim about the Triple Zero call.
Telstra denies job layoffs led to the outage
Telstra's chief executive Vicki Brady said on Friday she was notified about the mass outage at 7am on Wednesday, almost three hours after it occurred.
"Our focus will be what are the lessons out of this, what changes we need to make, but I do really want to raise that we do have very clear processes around how we manage incidents," she said.
Brady said while Telstra is still investigating the incident, the outage seemed to be triggered by an error following a software restart.
Earlier this year, Telstra announced it would cut up to 650 jobs as the company outsourced some tasks overseas. Brady rejected claims that the incident was related to the mass redundancies at the company.
"No indication any restructure of jobs has impacted the particular issue."
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