The head of the main telecommunications workers union has warned that the string of outages and technical problems experienced by Telstra customers will only worsen as the company dramatically steps up its "slash and burn" approach by cutting 8,000 jobs over the next three years.

Shane Murphy, the NSW branch secretary and national president of the Communications, Electrical and Plumbing Union, said on Wednesday that "outage after outage" over the past few months was a direct result of the significant cuts which had already occurred under chief executive Andrew Penn, but this would now be exacerbated by the aggressive job cuts which were on an unprecedented scale. He likened it to the collapse of the airline Ansett in 2001 when 15,000 jobs were lost, but that was when a company had actually gone bust.