Telstra (Australia's largest telecommunications provider) has confirmed that a nationwide mobile network outage last week disrupted approximately 45% of all calls and data sessions, affecting nearly nine million customers. Chief executive Vicki Brady told a Senate inquiry that the failure stemmed from a software update that had not been applied to a time-keeping server in Melbourne, causing it to reboot with an incorrect date of 2006; the erroneous timestamp then rippled through the network, invalidating authentication certificates across interconnected systems. Brady offered a public apology and said Telstra was working to compensate affected customers, though critics on the inquiry committee noted the outage coincided with a reported 31% rise in the company's annual profit and a growing number of network disruptions in 2025.