Telstra CEO Vicky Brady’s pay docked $607,000 over July outage

Telstra boss Vicky Brady has copped a more than $600,000 penalty for an outage in July that left up to 25 million people without phone coverage.

Telco’s annual report — released on the same day the company posted a full-year net profit of more than $2 billion — said the chief executive would lose $607,000 in short-term incentive bonuses.

The cutback came after the board reduced her individual performance multiplier by 20 percentage points, reducing her bonus to just over 70 per cent of her maximum.

But with other bonuses and fixed pay of almost $2.5 million, she still took home $6.83m — up $600,000 from a year earlier.

Other board member were also docked for the outage.

The outage took down roughly 45 per cent of its network at its peak and sparked an Australian Competition and Consumer Commission inquiry.

“When our network fails, the impact is real and we’re deeply sorry for the disruption the incident caused,” the company said.

“Our investigations to date indicate the outage was caused by something within our control - the combination of an undocumented network design change and a software update that had not been applied.”

A parliamentary inquiry was told last month that Telstra did not act on repeated warnings to fix an impending issue with a piece of equipment that ultimately triggered the devastating network outage.

US-based supplier Microchip Technology warned the telco multiple times that a Network Time Protocol server required a software update to prevent a “rollover problem” that would take down the system, Telstra officials told a hearing in Canberra.

At the inquiry, Ms Brady said she was “deeply sorry” for the failure.

“Telstra let Australians down. We let our customers down, we let the community down, and we fell short of what people rightly expect from us,” she told the hearing on Friday.

Telstra posted a net profit of $2.4b, up 2.7 per cent, for the 2025/26 year, despite flat revenue growth of $22.9 billion.

Underlying earnings, before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation, came to $8.3b, which was in the middle of its guidance range.

Telstra declared a final dividend of 10.5¢, taking the total for the year to 21¢ per share, in line with expectations of a 10.5 per cent increase in its payout to shareholders.

It also announced a second on-market share buyback of up to $1b after completing a $1.25b share sweep in June.

Telstra’s consumer arm, which is its growth engine, lifted revenue by 0.7 per cent to $10.9b.

In contrast, its business division revenue rose 1.1 per cent to $2.9b.

Telstra’s share price is sitting at $5, on par with a year earlier, after tumbling about a tenth since May.