Too big to wail? Telstra stock investors stay firm through outage scandal

If you’re looking for a stock with a resilient investorbase, look no further than national telco giant Telstra Group Ltd (ASX:TLS).

Earlier this week Telstra won its way onto prime-time broadcasts and front pages across the nation when 000 calls, EFTPOS payments and train services on the east coast all failed due to an issue inside Telstra’s fairly opaque national telecomms infrastructure.

This is the second time in relatively recent Australian history that 000 calls have mysteriously failed out of the blue, the last hit being to the Optus network in September 2025.

On Friday, a press conference with the Telstra CEO confirmed while software defects are suspected, the absolute 100%-certain cause of what happened this week hasn’t been identified.

But at the same time, Telstra is giving the all-clear to investors and the Australian public writ large, that the problems are all gone now and everything is back to normal.

(This comes even as reports emerge that there may have been one death the result of 000 call failures earlier this week.)

What is perhaps most interesting to observe abut all of this is that Telstra’s share price actually notched upwards on Friday, back to A$5/sh flat.

And, while the share price did react to news intraweek, as at 11.15am AEST on Friday, Telstra’s share price is flat WoW – in other words, the scandal hasn’t touched the share price at all.

It’s worth noting first and foremost that telco stocks lack sex appeal, perhaps unlike tech stocks, where highly publicised scandals may carry more weight.

Telcos are some of the most boring companies if you aren’t a radio science enthusiast. But because they are bluechip stocks integral to the nation running smoothly on a day-by-day basis (clearly), they’re also safe bets for long-term strategies employed by the sensibly-loyal and superfunds.

So in this case it’s probable there aren’t hordes of retail investors juicing Telstra and reacting to hour-by-hour headlines, the vast sums of capital deployed in Telstra are bound by overhead insto rules, and of course, Telstra is likely a beneficiary of being too-big-to-fail.

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