Optus customers woke up this morning to find they were unable to get their social media fix, and they weren’t happy. Around 4am AEDT, customers started to report an inability to access both mobile and home internet services. Optus advised it was investigating the issue, with reports emerging around midday of some services coming back online.
- Around 12.30pm, Optus chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin told radio 2GB the path to restoration had been found, nearly nine hours after the blackout began.
- The outage, one of the largest in Australia’s history, sent alarm bells ringing across the country.
- Fortunately, Optus users could still use roaming to call 000 if they were within the coverage of other telecommunication service providers.
What is a ‘deep network’ problem?
- Telecommunications networks include three components: the core, transit and access networks.
- You can think of the core network as the systems that allow customers’ devices to connect to and access phone and internet services.
What could have caused this?
- There is no indication that it is anything to do with spyware at this stage.
- At the same time, experts have noted mobile cell towers are working, and there seems to be no damage to the underlying fibre optic network.
- This means we can probably rule out an issue in the transit or access networks.
- However, it could also be a result of other factors, such as a hardware fault that then causes a software failure.
- Issues in back-end billing and management systems can generate a cascade of failures throughout the rest of a network.
How will this be fixed?
- For Optus, the hard work will continue after the fix is in place to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
- Speaking on 3AW Afternoons, Bayer Rosmarin said:
We are looking at what we can do to say thank you to our customers for their patience.
- We are looking at what we can do to say thank you to our customers for their patience.
- In other words, the specific penalties for Optus will be based on individual agreements it has made with various parties using or sharing its services.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
