“Any time we have an event like this we work day and night to identify what the route cause was and make sure we move quickly to fix what it was,” Mr Wright said at a press conference in Brisbane.

“Sometimes it's a software fault, sometimes it's a bit of hardware, so we will be working as quickly as possible," he said.

Mr Wright said the company would manage customers on an individual basis for compensation. Despite this, some have threatened to leave the telco on social media, pointing to other recent outages, while others were keen for "free data" days.

This is the latest in a string of problems for Telstra. Last week, the telco’s share price fell to the lowest level in seven years after updating guidance to the lower end of its full year earnings expectation of between $10.1 billion and $10.6 billion before interest and tax on the back of headwinds from the NBN and intense mobile competition.

And by the end of Monday, following the outage, Telstra’s share price had declined 1.75 per cent to $2.80. On May 1, the share price was $3.20.

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Intelligent Investor deputy head of research Guarav Sodhi, at the Australian Shareholders Association conference on Monday, flagged "more pain to come” for the incumbent telcos in a disrupted mobile market.

In particular, TPG Telecom’s upcoming fourth network and low-cost plans are seen as a threat to the major telcos in a “price war” for mobile customers. Intelligent Investor holds TPG shares.

“The incumbents should be worried. They need to make a response and as investors we need to respond. If you think Telstra looks like a bargain at these levels I just think we should sit back and be a bit more patient,” he said.

“All their advantage, all their profits come from being a telco in Australia [while] all their ambition, all their capital expenditure, is actually trying to be a global tech company, which makes no sense.

"So the really scary part for Telstra isn’t that they’re being disrupted, it’s their response to being disrupted, which appears quite panicky and mindless,” he said.

A Telstra spokesman said the "majority" of capital expenditure was directed to the core business and network.

"We are halfway [through] our up to $3 billion strategic investment program and the weight of this to date has been on the network," he said.