Telstra's chief executive, Vicki Brady, has faced intense questioning for the first time since a nationwide outage on Wednesday disrupted the Australian telecommunications company's network. The failure affected train services, payment systems and triple zero emergency calls, making it a serious incident given the potential public-safety implications of losing access to emergency lines.

Returning from annual leave, Brady rejected suggestions that job restructuring had caused the failure, insisting that "people and processes worked as they should have". She said the outage stemmed from a software glitch, which the company would investigate thoroughly, and confirmed that executive bonuses would be reviewed in light of the incident. The outage has drawn wider political and legal attention, including a South Australian police investigation into a claimed death linked to the disruption.