Telstra CEO points to undocumented software change for outage in Senate testimony

July 17 : Telstra CEO Vicki Brady told a Senate inquiry on Friday that last week's outage at Australia's largest telecoms firm was likely caused by an undocumented design change and a missed software update on a network time-keeping device.Last Wednesday's outage, the latest in a series of incidents to hit Australia's telecommunications sector over the past few years, cut phone services for thousands of customers, disrupted wireless payments and halted trains.Optus, the country's second-biggest telecoms firm, suffered a 13-hour disruption to emergency call services last year, possibly causing four deaths.That followed a 2022 cyberattack exposing millions of people's personal details and a 2023 outage, which left millions without phone or internet for a day. In her opening statement to the