Sally Branson, founder and managing director of the Sally Branson Consulting Group.
There is a strange comfort in watching a crisis unfold at a company that is not yours.
It is also the most valuable professional development available to anyone responsible for a reputation, because the honest truth of our discipline is that the best learning is comparative.
Luckily, or hopefully none of us gets enough crises of our own to master this work through direct experience, and nobody would want to. We learn by watching others, closely and without smugness, and asking the only question that matters: where would we have made the same call?
Telstra has given the industry plenty to compare this week. Start with what it did well, because the comparison with Optus is instructive.
When Optus faced its Triple Zero crisis, its chief executive fronted the media 28 hours after management learnt of the problem, and some officials found out about the outage from the press conference itself.
Telstra's acting chief executive was in front of cameras the same morning, apologised without qualification, and admitted the company did not yet know the root cause. Judged against its competitor's playbook, Telstra's first response was faster, franker and more human.
The early hours suggested an organisation that had, in fact, studied the comparison.
Then it declared the outage resolved, and a second fault emerged within hours, this time affecting some emergency calls. In South Australia, police are investigating a death that occurred while the network was down.
Trust does not erode evenly across a crisis. It breaks at specific moments, and the sharpest break comes when a reassurance is proven wrong.
The public will forgive infrastructure failing. Networks are complex, things break, people understand this. What they do not forgive is being told it is fixed when it is not, because at that point the failure migrates from your systems to your word.
Telstra's early candour bought it real credibility on Wednesday morning. The premature all-clear spent it by Wednesday night, and every statement the company makes now will be read with a discount applied.
The subtler lesson sits in what was communicated, and to whom.
Australian phones are required to fall back to other networks for emergency calls, and technology commentator Trevor Long's analysis of the welfare check data suggests many people who dialled Triple Zero during the outage did get through by camping on to Optus or TPG.
The problem was that phones in SOS mode looked dead, connections took longer than expected, and callers hung up. The safety net held. Almost nobody knew it was there.
That gap is worth sitting with, because it reveals something about how crisis communications are still conceived.
Most organisations treat it as a reporting function: what broke, when it will be fixed. But between those two messages, the audience is not waiting for updates. They are trying to reach an ambulance, run a payroll, get a train home.
What serves them in those hours is not the restoration timeline. It is knowing what still works and what to do in the meantime. The fix belongs to the company.
The alternative belongs to the customer, and communicating it is part of the response, not an afterthought to it. The most safety-critical information of the day reached the public late and largely through commentators rather than through Telstra itself.
Nothing about the network needed to change for that to go differently. Only the communications did.
Which brings us to the part that is hard to fathom for the average punter - how did this happen again, and again, and again. None of this was novel.
Telstra was fined $3 million after its 2024 outage disrupted emergency lines. Optus provided a nationally televised case study in how Triple Zero failures compound.
The lessons were documented in regulatory findings, parliamentary hearings and a thousand industry post-mortems, this column's genre included.
The playbook was not missing. And still, at the moment of pressure, the handling grew the crisis rather than containing it. I think the explanation is uncomfortable rather than complicated.
Playbooks are written in calm rooms for the organisation's benefit: approval chains, spokesperson hierarchies, update cadences.
The moments that actually determine how a crisis lands, the decision to declare recovery, the choice of what the public most needs to hear, are governed less by the document than by the instincts in the room when everyone is exhausted and desperate for it to be over.
The pressure to say it is fixed comes from inside the building. It always does. And no template withstands that pressure unless someone senior has the standing, and the standing authority, to resist it.
Telstra will recover. Its network is too central to national life for anything else. But the trust rebuild will take far longer than the technical one, and that asymmetry is the real finding of the week.
For the rest of us, the obligation is simply to do what our discipline has always required: study the comparison honestly, find the moment we would have made the same call, and fix that, quietly, before our own version arrives.