TLDR
During its 8 July 2026 national outage, Telstra paired every media statement with a post on its own newsroom so that AI tools and Google would surface Telstra's version of events first. Fixler said Google began referencing those posts within about 15 minutes. The ACMA has opened an investigation into whether Telstra met its regulatory obligations during the outage.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
What happened on 8 July
Telstra identified the problem at about 4.30am on Wednesday 8 July 2026, when a time-sync server restarted after maintenance with the wrong date "because of an underlying software configuration". At its peak the fault hit about 45% of calls and data sessions on Telstra's mobile network. Most calls and data were working again by mid-morning and the initial fault was fixed by 4pm, with a later fix for a secondary Triple Zero calling issue.[1] Along the way it halted rail services, took Tyro's EFTPOS offline and raised Triple Zero concerns on a network that carries about 25 million mobile services.[2]
The ACMA opened an investigation into whether Telstra met its regulatory obligations, including the Telecommunications (Customer Communications for Outages) Industry Standard 2024 and the emergency call rules. It has not published findings.[3]
Why the owned newsroom became the AI feed
Oren Fixler, Telstra's head of external channels and media, was acting head of communications that morning. Speaking at the humAIn conference in Sydney, he said the team set out to put Telstra's own updates where people would look for them, including Google and AI tools. "We knew increasingly that was going to come from AI," he said, and "most of them would just accept the answer at the top."[4]
So every media interaction was paired with a post on Telstra Exchange, the company's newsroom of about 20 years, which Fixler said carries strong domain authority. He said Google was referencing Telstra's answers within about 15 minutes, and kept doing so through the outage, while social, media and community content were kept saying the same thing.[4]
Google Trends as a writing tool
Since the outage, Telstra has been using Google Trends to find the exact words customers type and writing its responses in that language. "We forget to think about how the audience is actually talking about it," Fixler said, calling it "an unnatural shift for marketing and communication people".[4] In practice that means a customer searching something like "Telstra not working" should find those words in Telstra's own update, not a phrase written for a press release.
What it means for comms teams
Telstra's lesson for other Australian brands is that the first answer people see in a crisis may now be an AI summary rather than a news story, and that the summary draws on whatever credible pages exist at that moment. A company with an established newsroom, publishing within minutes in the words customers use, has a better chance of being the source. Telstra controls what it publishes, though, not how an AI tool summarises it, and Fixler didn't say how often the AI answers matched Telstra's wording.[4]
SOURCES & CITATIONS
James Dore is founder and editor of Prompt the Market and Strategy Director at Bushnote, a Sydney strategy, SEO and AI search agency. He has a background in strategy, media and financial services, and led consumer product marketing at MONEYME. He writes on AI search, answer engines, technology policy and media economics.
