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

Ms Brady has provided a time-stamped account of when the Telstra outage was first detected.

“We first detected an issue at 4:20am and posted an update on our website at 4:38am to confirm we were looking into it,” the telco’s CEO said.

“At that stage, the impact was limited. We saw small increases in call failures, and our team began investigating immediately.

“We communicated more broadly while the issue was still developing and before its full scale was known.

“We responded to our first media inquiry at 6:33am and published a statement on social media at 6:38am to let our customers know that we were investigating an issue.

“At that point, the impact had not met the threshold of a major outage.”

Telstra CEO Vicki Brady has addressed a Senate hearing into the telco’s nationwide outage that impacted access to triple-zero calls.

“We let our customers down.,” she said.

“We let the community down and we fell short of what people rightly expect from us.

“For this, I am deeply sorry. Australians rely on Telstra every day to run businesses, stay in contact with family, access essential services and most importantly, to get help in an emergency.

“When our network fails, the impact is real. I particularly want to acknowledge the concern caused by impacts to some people’s triple-zero connection.

“Triple-zero sits at the heart of public trust in Australia’s communication system. Telstra has a critical role in that system, and we take that responsibility exteremely seriously.”

Telstra has conceded a failed software update was behind this month’s mass network outage that affected triple-zero services, with the telco telling a senate inquiry its internal controls “were not good enough”.

In a submission released by Parliament hours before a public hearing, Telstra details how an undocumented design change and a software update that was never applied led to the company’s biggest meltdown in a decade.

“A software update had also not been applied to the device. Had that software update been completed or had the design change been properly documented and reflected in the maintenance procedure, the outage may not have occurred,” it said.

“That is clearly unacceptable. If maintenance work can trigger this kind of outage, it suggests our controls were not good enough,” the company added in its submission.”

The documents released today have been approved and verified by the White House Government Transparency Taskforce and the Intelligence Advisory Board, Donald Trump says.

“The documents we will release, starting tonight, have been gathered by the White House government, Transparency Task Force, a great group of people, along with the staff of the president’s intelligence advisory board, supported by our top intelligence agency chiefs, who have all personally reviewd the findings,” he said.

“We are presenting this evening and fully confirmed their authenticity.

“Purpose in disclosing this information is not to weaken confidence in elections, but to earn that confidence by confronting vulnerabilities and correcting them very, very quickly.”

Donald Trump has made claims the county’s voting machines used in elections are “vulnerbale” to hacking.

“Our government has long known these machines are extremely exposed to attack,” he said.

“We judge that the United States adversaries, including at a minimum Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, as well as non-state groups, have the capability to compromise US election infrastructure,” he said, quoting a supposed intelligence assessment.

“Great damage has been done to our country. Our elections were left vulnerable.

“This cannot be allowed to continue. Every American should be able to agree that we deserve the most secure election system in the world.”

Mr Trump says his administration will “fix” the country’s election system to avoid another “stolen” election.

“We’re in the process of informing governors, senators, and members of Congress of potential issues in their states,” he said.

“If you look at voting today, it’s in such bad shape in so many states, and we are committing to fix it.

“We can can never watch a stolen election again. Vulnerabilities in our electronic voting systems are bad.

“We will remove all ineligible votes form the list immediately, most importantly addressing the election security crisis.

“This landmark bill requires all voters must show photo voter ID. They must supply proof of citizenship.”

Off the back of claiming China gained access to US voter data, the President says the country was looking to pay US journalists to write negative content about him.

“The Chinese government sought to identify US journalists who had reported negatively on the US president and pay them large sums of money to write more negative articles about him as many as they could, and they didn’t care what they said,” Mr Trump said.

“The Chinese government wanted US president to lose the next election.”

Donald Trump has said China illicitly gained access to large troves of information on US voters.

“Over a period of years, starting during the 2020 election cycle, the People’s Republic of China carried out what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history, resulting in China’s illicit acquisition of 220 million years,” Mr Trump said.

“That information includes names, addresses, phone numbers, political party preferences and other sensitive data that would be needed to register to vote and engage in other nefarious activities.

“Which is exactly what was happening,”

Mr Trump has announced a framework to address “shocking vulnerabilities” in the US’s election infrastructure.

“For many years I’ve called for a bold, swift and decisive action to protect the integrity of America’s elections. Every American deserves to know that when they cast their vote that vote will be counted accurately in a system and that is to make that system secure,” he said.

“Unfortunately the system we have today falls catastrophically short of that standard.

“Tonight I am announcing the immediate declassification and release of radical intelligence revealing shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure.

This evidence shows that the election system we have dangerously exposes and really exposes like levels never thought possible, the hacking, exploitation and foreign interference just as disturbingly this vital information has for many years been covered up and hidden from you.”

Donald Trump has begun speaking at the White House, opening his speech by talking about his administration’s impact on the stock market and health care.

“Good evening, before we begin, I’m proud to report that our country is safer, stronger and far wealthier than it has ever been before,” he said.

“We are doing great.

“Our stock markets are at the highest point in many years, but we can actually say of all time. Your 401(k), pensions and retirement accounts are setting every single day the highest in history.

“For years we paid the highest price for description drugs anywhere in the world, now we pay the lowest price under my most favourite nation’s policy.

“Because I was able to get the rest of the world and the pharmaceutical companies to act responsibly, drug prices are coming down by 70, 80 and 90 per cent.

“The Trump government will reduce the cost of healthcare.”