Millions of Australians were left without a phone or internet connection on Wednesday after the country's second-largest telecommunications provider experienced an unexplained nationwide outage.
I wonder if it will be anything like the Rogers outage in Canada. A bad software maintenance update made their infrastructure malfunction and so many people were offline from a few days to a week.
Yeah sounds like it was something similar. CloudFlare showed spikes in BGP announcements (the Border Gateway Protocol - basically how each network node knows it’s neighbours and the route through that neighbourhood) when the system went down. So Optus stopped telling the world it existed and everything updated around it, shutting it out from the internet.
That page about Roger’s outage is an interesting read. Interac deserves a (lesser) part of the blame, such a critical service shouldn’t depend on a single network provider. Good practices include redundancy in different locations and backed by different network and electricity provider, or at least not share the same local power grid.
We’d thankfully just disconnected from Optus (not easy, we had a commercial fibre line) a few days before this outage. They’ve been getting progressively less reliable and outages had almost become routine.
Looking forward to read about the postmortem analysis of this outage, and whether this operator had single points of failure.
I wonder if it will be anything like the Rogers outage in Canada. A bad software maintenance update made their infrastructure malfunction and so many people were offline from a few days to a week.
Yeah sounds like it was something similar. CloudFlare showed spikes in BGP announcements (the Border Gateway Protocol - basically how each network node knows it’s neighbours and the route through that neighbourhood) when the system went down. So Optus stopped telling the world it existed and everything updated around it, shutting it out from the internet.
That page about Roger’s outage is an interesting read. Interac deserves a (lesser) part of the blame, such a critical service shouldn’t depend on a single network provider. Good practices include redundancy in different locations and backed by different network and electricity provider, or at least not share the same local power grid.
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We’d thankfully just disconnected from Optus (not easy, we had a commercial fibre line) a few days before this outage. They’ve been getting progressively less reliable and outages had almost become routine.