When Telstra’s boss Vicki Brady returns to work on Friday after cutting a holiday short to deal with a crisis at the telco, she will be facing a storm.
The company Brady leads is under fire after a crippling outage, followed by a mass failure of Triple Zero calls on its network, prompting the government to demand answers.
It is shaping up as one of the biggest tests yet for her leadership, which has ushered in major change at the telco giant, including deep cost-cutting and sustained price hikes.
The woman who has run Telstra since 2022 will have to hope that her early training in finance, followed by a long career in the relatively anonymous executive ranks of telecommunications companies, will prepare her for the very different world of an angry public frustrated by yet another phone outage.
Brady was set to land back in the country on Friday morning after cutting short her family’s overseas trip – the reason given for her silence since Telstra’s time-travel style glitch began blocking calls, internet connections, payments and trains early on Wednesday and a secondary, related outage that continued into Thursday morning, by which point 639 calls to Triple Zero had failed.
Instead, Australia’s 34th highest-paid chief executive, who was on a take-home salary of $6.7 million in 2025, left it to her chief financial officer Michael Ackland – the former head of GE Healthcare and a seasoned veteran of corporate consulting – to be the only visible face of Telstra’s public response.
On Thursday, his second day of fronting hostile press conferences, Ackland insisted Brady’s Friday flight home was the fastest option available.
“She got on the first plane that she could get onto to get back,” he told reporters in Melbourne. “She came back immediately, changed her plans, and she’ll be back here as soon as she possibly could.”
Ackland said he and Telstra’s leadership team had been in regular contact with Brady, but would not confirm if she would be ready to hold a press conference as early as Friday.
“I would expect that she will want to get up to speed,” he said.
Brady’s vision for Telstra has been for a more efficient, leaner telco that built on the cornerstone of its reputation as Australia’s most reliable carrier through a period in which rivals suffered crippling outages.
Since taking over as boss in September 2022, Telstra’s value has increased from about $3.94 per share to more than $5.40 earlier this year, though it has fallen in recent weeks to just under $5, taking the company’s market capitalisation to more than $55 billion.
That growth has come thanks to a recent strategy of rounds of jobs cuts and outsourcing. In all, full-time employee headcount shrunk to 29,520 by the end of December 2026 from the peak of 33,761 it had grown to in mid-2024 following early acquisitions and initiatives in Brady’s term. In February, Telstra proposed cutting a further 400 enterprise and consumer jobs, with many to be outsourced to India.
Brady has also fundamentally reshaped how Telstra charges its customers. Under her leadership, the telco abandoned its model of CPI-linked annual price reviews in favour of rolling, staggered increases.
Over the past two years, this strategy has pushed the cost of core postpaid plans up by $12 a month through successive hikes in August 2024, July 2025, and May 2026. Even budget-conscious users haven’t been spared, with these price pressures trickling down to Telstra’s subsidiaries, Belong and Boost Mobile.
Telstra’s strong performance, built on tough decisions, has led colleagues to praise her work ethic.
“She is one of the most conscientious and self-effacing colleagues I have had in corporate work,” one telecommunications veteran, who asked to remain anonymous, told this masthead.
Brady is at her core a numbers person, and colleagues describe her as frank, no-nonsense, and highly financially literate with a balanced perspective on risk.
Employees, however, have felt these traits markedly differently. “Outsourcing work, slicing and dicing the corporate structure, and slashing local jobs when [Telstra] should be investing in its domestic workforce,” is how Shane Murphy, Communications Workers Union national secretary, views her leadership.
Brady’s route to the top job at Telstra ran through finance, then away from it, then back again. She grew up in Holbrook, in regional New South Wales, where she helped her father run one of the town’s three pubs – which helped spark an early passion for business and hard work.
“I pulled beers, I waitressed, I cleaned, I did the cash book, I did the banking. And I enjoyed most of it,” she told the Australian Financial Review in 2022.
“What Dad really instilled in me was that if you’re passionate about it, you work hard, then you can build a successful business.
“People look at owning a pub and think, ‘gee that must be so much fun’. And don’t get me wrong, he enjoyed it, but he worked so hard. Early mornings, late nights. It was really 24/7.”
Brady studied a Bachelor of Commerce at the Australian National University in Canberra before a Master of Science in Management at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. She qualified as a chartered accountant, credentials that set her apart from the engineers and career operators who have often run Australian telcos.
Her early career took her through KPMG and then telecommunications, including nearly two decades at Optus and its Singaporean parent SingTel, in Australia and overseas. She came up inside the challenger camp before crossing to the incumbent, and she has watched Optus’ recent troubles from the vantage of a former insider.
Brady joined Telstra in 2016 and, by her own account, spent longer outside finance than in it once she arrived – a choice she describes as the making of her. She ran sales and service and then the consumer division, before taking charge of consumer and small business, a unit carrying about $14.6 billion in income.
There she helped architect the T22 strategy, the cost-cutting program that reshaped the company. Only later did she return to finance as chief financial officer, the role she held immediately before being named to the top job.
She was the first woman to be appointed as Telstra’s chief executive, and has since leaned hard into the telco’s infrastructure-and-AI story, though she is relatively media shy compared with her predecessor, Andy Penn.
Brady lives in a sprawling five-bedroom mansion in Killara on Sydney’s upper north shore, which features a pool and tennis court. She bought the home for $6 million in 2015 with her husband Mark, who is a stay-at-home dad for their daughters. She has sat on the board of the prestigious Ravenswood School for Girls, with its secondary campus a short walk from the Brady family house.
Brady has consistently defended Telstra’s aggressive price hikes as necessary to fund ongoing investments in 5G capacity, regional coverage, and security infrastructure.
The public case for Telstra rests on premium pricing justified by network reliability but when the network fails – as it did this week – the reputational cost lands squarely on the strategy Brady has spent a career building, leaving millions of customers questioning the value of their increasingly expensive plans.
The Business Briefing newsletter delivers major stories, exclusive coverage and expert opinion. Sign up to get it every weekday morning.
About the Author
