Australia's economy lost at least A$854 million (US$596 million) from a single 12-hour Telstra network failure in July, according to a study by FTI Consulting published as the operator's board faced an angry annual general meeting on Tuesday.

The outage, triggered by a network timer fault, knocked out the country's largest telco network and its consequences are still being tallied. FTI, commissioned by consumer group ACANN, put the net cost at A$552 million ($385 million) in lost GDP plus A$302 million ($211 million) in direct losses to businesses and consumers — roughly $50 million in economic damage per hour of downtime.

"This study demonstrates a large-scale mobile outage can have significant impacts across the economy," FTI said, while conceding its figures are conservative because it still lacks data on some sectors.

What happened at the AGM?

Telstra's leadership took fire on multiple fronts. CEO Vicki Brady was on leave, leaving CFO Michael Ackland to front the media. One shareholder complained that chairman Craig Dunn did not step up, and said Ackland looked like "a fish out of water" explaining the outage to an angry public. The shareholder also flagged lost dividend payments and reputational damage.

Board member Maxine Brenner attracted the sharpest institutional criticism. Governance advisor Institutional Shareholder Services argued she should not sit on any board, citing her record at Telstra and previously at airline Qantas. Brenner held her seat but drew an unusually strong protest vote of 11.5% of proxies.

How does Optus fit the picture?

The same week, Australian Tax Office data reinforced industry arguments that rival Optus's repeated network failures trace back to the financial policies of its Singapore-based parent, Singtel. Optus paid no tax last financial year and has paid virtually none for six years, after regularly paying tax up to 2020, according to Guardian Australia reporting.

A central factor, the reporting shows, is depreciation and amortization — the accounting measure of how fast capital equipment ages, a critical metric for a company with billions of dollars in deployed network assets.

Optus has written down the value of its equipment by just under 22% in each of the past two financial years. Over the same period:

• Singtel Singapore ran at 16–17%
• Telstra at 17–19%
• StarHub at 10%

That gap of a few percentage points compounds. Optus reported earnings before interest of A$550 million ($384 million) on revenue of A$8.35 billion ($5.83 billion) in 2024/25 — a 6.6% margin. Telstra and Singtel posted EBIT margins of 17.4% and 21.6% respectively. In other words, Optus converts revenue into operating earnings at roughly a third the rate of its parent and its main domestic rival.

Why does this matter beyond accounting?

Aggressive write-downs shrink reported profits, which in Optus's case coincides with six years of negligible tax payments. The industry view, now supported by the ATO data, is that these policies correlate with the network failures that have made Optus a repeat offender on outages.

The record is grim. Optus's network went down for 13 hours on September 18 last year, disabling the emergency call system and reportedly causing four deaths. A 2023 outage cost the company A$40 million and forced the resignation of CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin. Smaller failures have followed, the latest just two months ago.

Neither FTI's study nor the ATO data settles causation on their own. FTI itself admits its damage estimate is incomplete, and depreciation rates reflect accounting choices as much as investment levels. What the numbers do establish is scale: one 12-hour failure at one operator wiped out more than half a billion dollars in GDP, and Australia's second-largest operator has now produced a decade-long pattern of underinvestment signals paired with recurring blackouts.

Telstra's board survived Tuesday's vote, but with an 11.5% protest against Brenner and shareholders openly questioning dividend cover, the pressure to demonstrate network resilience — and to be seen defending it — will carry into the next reporting season.