During a tense press conference called by Telstra, with CEO Vicki Brady back in the country after cutting short an overseas family holiday, a journalist asked a question about executive bonuses at Australia's biggest telco in the wake of an embarrassing network outage.
The question was not really answered, and perhaps it was never going to yield the response the reporter was looking for.
But for a company whose executives are very well remunerated, there are certainly going to be plenty more questions about another major mobile network outage in Australia, fewer than 12 months on from the Optus outage that was linked to four deaths across WA and South Australia with customers unable to reach 000.
With Brady reportedly earning over $6 million per year as chief executive (not including bonuses), and consumers facing multiple price hikes for their mobile plans in recent years, an outage that left train passengers stranded, businesses unable to take payments, and hundreds of 000 calls failing to go through is terrible optics.
The telco will face fines as the fallout from last week's debacle continues, but monetary punishment in the low-to-medium eight figures is unlikely to hit Telstra hard enough to make much impact, according to Mark Gregory, Associate Professor at RMIT University's School of Engineering.
"It's only when the fines are able to influence what the shareholders receive (that they would have an impact)," Gregory said.
"The current fines are very small in the grand scheme of things. When you consider that potentially Telstra might have a fine of $30 million, their annual profit was $2.3 billion, so that's really a very small percentage of this company's profit."
Luckily, there were no deaths attributable to this fiasco, but when it comes to life-and-death situations, seconds matter.
As the premium option in a marketplace with only a handful of options for consumers, Australians are right to be angry at an outage that seemed easily preventable.
Government inquiries will determine the root cause of the downtime, but these outages could keep occurring without updated legislation and oversight.
Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young has led calls for change, going as far as calling industry regulator ACMA "a lapdog, not a watchdog."
ACMA has previously faced criticism for lacking any true authority, and been accused of "cozying up" to the major telcos with reductions in fines for serious breaches of Australian legislation.
Gregory is adamant that the laws need refreshing, with a significant lack of protection for Australian consumers, and not enough provisions for compensation when these preventable outages cause chaos around the country.
"The legislation and regulations were written back in the 1990s at a time when the focus was on the telcos and competition," he said.
"We need a 'Telecommunications Act 2027' where the legislation is completely rebuilt with the consumer in the centre and (focus on) reliability, safety, and resiliency.
"We need those things built around the consumer and, of course, compensation when the telcos don't live up to their end of the bargain."
There is also a lack of options for Australians when it comes to their phone provider. While providers like Kogan, Woolworths Mobile, Boost and Felix all typically offer cheaper alternatives to the major telcos, they are only piggybacking off their networks.
Telstra can still claim the largest coverage network in Australia, but Optus and Vodafone have recently made strides in this area, providing some more competition. Telstra's long standing reputation of being the only option outside of the major cities has slowly eroded, making their service costs harder to rationalise for consumers.
But there may be a new wave of competitors coming into the market with the potential to disrupt the major telcos.
Businesses using low earth object technology, which is utilised by Starlink to connect millions of people in rural areas across the globe to communications services, could provide more competition. LEO tech has the benefit of snappy response times, reducing latency and boosting speeds for consumers.
Push for domestic roaming in Australia
Most people would only think of roaming when leaving Australia as a means of staying connected while on an overseas holiday or work trip.
However, there has been a recent push to introduce domestic roaming in Australia, which, if implemented, would mean your iPhone or Android device would automatically connect to the tower with the best connection - regardless of your chosen telco, you could connect to Telstra, Vodafone, or Optus infrastructure.
Had this been in place, it would have mitigated the impact of the two major recent outages with the other telcos taking on the load of Telstra customers who had been deprived of mobile coverage, especially in emergency situations requiring calls to triple-zero.
New Zealand and Canada have implemented domestic roaming, resulting in increased investment into infrastructure from telcos, as well as more competition that has been beneficial for consumers.
While the concept has faced some pushback and could still be years away from implementation, the Australian government is under pressure to show some teeth after another highly disruptive telco outage, and may be looking at domestic roaming more seriously.