Absent CEO expected to face intense scrutiny when she returns to Australia

Telstra boss Vicki Brady will face a storm when she returns to work on Friday after cutting her holiday short due to the telecoms industry crisis.

The company Brady leads is under fire after a crippling outage and subsequent mass failure to call for Triple Zero on its network prompted the government to demand a response.

This is shaping up to be one of the biggest tests yet for his leadership, which has ushered in massive change at the telecommunications giant, including deep cost cuts and persistent price increases.

The woman who has run Telstra since 2022 will have to hope that her early training in finance and a long career in the relatively anonymous executive ranks of telcos will prepare her for the very different world of an angry public fed up with yet another phone outage.

Brady was preparing to return to the country Friday morning after cutting short his family’s overseas trip; This has been cited as the reason why Telstra has remained silent since the time travel-style glitch began blocking calls, internet connections, payments and trains on Wednesday, with a secondary, related outage continuing until Thursday morning when 639 calls to Triple Zero failed.

Instead, Australia’s 34th highest-paid CEO, with a salary of $6.7 million in 2025, has left it to chief financial officer Michael Ackland, the former chairman of GE Healthcare and a seasoned veteran of corporate consulting, to be the sole visible face of Telstra’s public backlash.

On Thursday, the second day of hostile press conferences, Ackland insisted that Brady’s flight home on Friday was the quickest possible option.

“He got on the first plane he could to come back,” he told reporters in Melbourne. “He came back immediately, changed his plans and will be back here as soon as possible.”

Ackland said he and Telstra’s leadership team were in regular contact with Brady but would not confirm whether he was prepared to hold a press conference as early as Friday.

“I’m hoping he’ll want to step up,” he said.

Brady’s vision for Telstra is a more efficient, leaner telco that has built the cornerstone of its reputation as Australia’s most reliable carrier at a time when rivals are experiencing crippling outages.

Since its takeover as boss in September 2022, Telstra’s value has risen from around $3.94 per share to more than $5.40 earlier this year, but has fallen to just under $5 in recent weeks, taking the company’s market value to over $55 billion.

This growth was driven by a recent layoffs and outsourcing strategy. In total, the number of full-time employees fell to 29,520 at the end of December 2026 from a peak of 33,761 in mid-2024, following early acquisitions and ventures during Brady’s term. In February, Telstra proposed cutting a further 400 businesses and consumers and outsourcing many to India.

Brady has also fundamentally reshaped the way Telstra charges its customers. Under his leadership, the telco abandoned its model of CPI-linked annual price reviews in favor of continuous, gradual increases.

Over the past two years, this strategy has increased the cost of basic postpaid plans by $12 per month, with successive increases in August 2024, July 2025, and May 2026. Even budget-conscious users could not escape these price pressures, which were also reflected in Telstra’s subsidiaries Belong and Boost Mobile.

Telstra’s strong performance through tough decisions led colleagues to praise his work ethic.

“He is one of the most conscientious and self-effacing colleagues I have had in corporate work,” a telecommunications veteran who wished to remain anonymous told this imprint.

Brady is a numbers person at heart, and colleagues describe him as articulate, logical and extremely financially savvy, with a balanced view of risk.

However, employees felt these characteristics quite differently. “Outsourcing work, dismantling the corporate structure and cutting local jobs [Telstra] Its leadership must invest in its domestic workforce,” says Shane Murphy, national secretary of the Communications Workers Union.

Brady’s route to the top job at Telstra was through finance, then away, then back again. He grew up in Holbrook, New South Wales, where he helped his father run one of three pubs in the town; which helped spark an early passion for business and hard work.

“I brewed beer, I worked as a waiter, I cleaned, I did the cash book, I did the banking. And I enjoyed most of it,” he said. Australian Financial Review In 2022.

“What my father instilled in me was that if you are passionate about it, if you work hard, you can build a successful business.

“People think about owning a bar and think, ‘Wow, that must be so much fun.’ Don’t get me wrong, he enjoyed it, but he worked hard. Early in the morning, late at night. He literally worked 24/7.”

Brady studied a Bachelor of Commerce at the Australian National University in Canberra before studying for a Master of Management at Stanford University Graduate School of Business. He was qualified as a chartered accountant, a credential that set him apart from the engineers and career operators who often run Australian telecommunications companies.

His early career took him to KPMG and then into telecommunications, including nearly two decades spent in Australia and abroad at Optus and its Singaporean parent company SingTel. Before moving on to the incumbent, he came into the rival camp and watched Optus’ recent troubles from the perspective of a former insider.

Brady joined Telstra in 2016 and, by his own account, spent longer outside finance than he had since arriving; This he describes as a choice he made. He ran sales and services, then the consumer division, before assuming responsibility for consumer and small businesses that generated approximately $14.6 billion in revenue.

There he helped design the T22 strategy, the cost-cutting program that reshaped the company. However, he later returned to the finance industry as chief financial officer; this was the role he held just before he was appointed to the top job.

She was the first woman to be appointed CEO of Telstra, and although she was relatively media shy compared to her predecessor Andy Penn, she has since leaned hard on the telco’s infrastructure and AI story.

Brady lives in Killara, on Sydney’s north shore, in a spacious five-bedroom mansion with a pool and tennis court. She bought the house for $6 million in 2015 with her husband, Mark, a stay-at-home dad to their daughter. She sat on the board of the prestigious Ravenswood School for Girls, whose second campus was a short walk from the Brady family home.

Brady has consistently defended Telstra’s aggressive price increases to fund ongoing investments in 5G capacity, regional coverage and security infrastructure.

Telstra’s public case is based on premium pricing justified by network reliability, but when the network fails (as it did this week) the reputational cost is reflected directly in the strategy Brady has spent building his career, and millions of customers begin to question the value of their increasingly expensive plans.

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