As Telstra melts down, telco’s ‘$6.7million-a-year’ CEO Vicki Brady is on holidays overseas… so will she rush back to her lavish five-bedroom mansion with pool to handle the crisis?

Telstra’s CEO Vicki Brady – one of the country’s highest paid chief executives – was enjoying an overseas trip as the country’s biggest telco went into meltdown on Wednesday morning.

Millions of Telstra customers were left unable to make calls, access mobile data or use electronic payment systems as a result of a technical failure involving timers at the telco’s Sydney and Melbourne data centres. 

The outage threw public transport into chaos, with all regional train services across Victoria suspended and major rail lines in NSW disrupted by telecommunications faults.

It was later revealed that Brady, 55, was on annual leave, with the telco’s chief financial officer, Michael Ackland, fronting the media instead.

Brady has been made aware of the outage back home.

‘Vicki is overseas at the moment and will be returning in the coming days,’ a Telstra spokeswoman told the Daily Mail.

‘Our CFO Michael Ackland is Vicki’s delegate and is managing the issue. 

‘Vicki has been briefed and kept updated throughout the morning. We’re making good progress on restoring services to full capacity.’ 

Brady became the first female CEO of Telstra in September 2022. She is Australia’s 34th highest earning CEO and took home $6.7 million in 2025, according to the Australian Financial Review.

Her understudy, Mr Ackland, has been praised for his handling of the crisis so far, with the Financial Review’s Chanticleer column describing his media conference on Wednesday morning as ‘calm and authoritative’.

Should Brady cancel her leave and return to Australia, she can take comfort not just in her enviable salary but the sprawling, two-storey, five-bedroom, three-bathroom property she calls home on Sydney’s north shore. 

Brady lives with her husband Mark and two teenage daughters. The property has an estimated value of $7.6million with pool and tennis court. 

Brady grew up in Holbrook in southern NSW, where she helped her father run one of the three pubs in the town, which instilled an early passion for business.

‘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 AFR 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 (Brady’s father] enjoyed it, but he worked so hard. Early mornings, late nights. It was really 24/7.’

Brady previously revealed that her stay-at-home husband is the primary carer for their daughters.

‘They are in that teenage phase, so they’re pretty good in keeping me grounded… and I love that,’ she told a Regional Development Australia forum in 2022.

‘When I walk in the door at home, I’m a mum. That’s my safe, comfortable space.

‘When I’m there with them, I try to be present.’ 

She sits on the executive board for the elite Ravenswood School for Girls alongside chair, former Westpac boss Gail Kelly.

A fellow board member once described Brady as ‘no nonsense, highly financially literate, frank and focused on a balanced perspective between risk and reward’.

Outside of work, Brady is also a sports fan who supports Richmond Tigers in the AFL and Manly Sea Eagles in the NRL.

Brady gained extensive executive leadership experience in telecommunications and services companies both in Australia and internationally at SingTel, KPMG and Optus before joining Telstra in 2016.

She spent almost two decades at Optus, which included a stint at California’s Stanford University studying for master’s degree.

She previously revealed that her husband used their time in the US to do some online study and reduce his golf handicap to 9.6.

‘It was like going completely back (to university days), living on campus in a little one- bedroom apartment student accommodation,’ Brady told the Daily Telegraph.

In 2018, she took 10 months off work following a breast cancer diagnosis.

‘My world just changed in an instant,’ she recalled.

‘I guess when you face your own mortality, it changes things. You go, okay, I need to step out of work because I can’t be my best there at this time.’

Following months of extensive treatment, which included chemotherapy and surgery, Brady returned to work as Telstra’s head of strategy and chief financial officer when she received a clean bill of health.

Just four months into her role as Telstra boss, Brady publicly defended her decision to work the Australia Day public holiday to support First Nations staff.

‘I’m proud that at Telstra, our people can now choose to take January 26 as a public holiday, or work that day and request an alternative day off,’ she said at the time.

‘I’ll be choosing to work and will take a different day of leave with my family, because that feels right for me.

‘How each of us recognise and respect the different meanings and complexities of Australia Day is one important part of our reconciliation journey,’ she continued.

‘For many First Nations peoples, Australia Day is a painful reminder of discrimination and exclusion. It marks a turning point that saw lives lost, culture devalued, and connections between people and places destroyed.

‘At the same time, for many people the day is also a chance to spend time with friends and family and celebrate the many things we can be proud of as a community.’

Telstra has apologised for Wednesday’s outage after the telco came under fire from Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

‘It is very disruptive to people’s lives throughout the country,’ he told reporters.

‘Telstra are investigating, but we’re working closely with them.

‘We’ll engage constructively, but I think people are entitled to get answers, but they also want answers that are accurate, and those investigations are ongoing.’

The communications watchdog has since launched an investigation.