Cause of massive Optus outage revealed
Optus has revealed that a routine software upgrade caused the outage that paralyzed the country last week, and claims it has taken steps to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
The meltdown affected as many as 10 million Australians and more than 400,000 businesses, who were left in the dark for up to 12 hours after their internet and phone services were cut.
Optus told its disgruntled customers on Monday afternoon that it had tried to discover what went wrong and insisted it had “taken steps to ensure it doesn’t happen again”.
“We sincerely apologize for letting our customers down and the inconvenience this causes,” the statement said.
Optus revealed on Monday afternoon that their massive nationwide outage, which affected up to 10 million Australians last week, was caused by a software upgrade
Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin (pictured) was criticized for not publicly addressing the outage until hours after the crisis
“Around 4:05 a.m. on Wednesday morning, the Optus network received changes to the routing information of an international peering network following a routine software upgrade,” the statement said.
“These changes to routing information propagated through multiple layers in our network and exceeded preset security levels on key routers that could not handle them.”
The statement said the action resulted in routers disconnecting from the Optus IP Core network to protect themselves.
This resulted in a large-scale effort to physically reconnect or restart the routers, which required ‘the dispatch of people across a number of locations in Australia’.
The controversial telecom provider said this was why some people were able to connect earlier than others last Wednesday.
‘Given the widespread impact of the outage. The investigation into this matter took longer than we would have liked as we explored various paths to recovery,” the statement said.
The blackout left millions of people unable to make and receive calls and complete transactions, with CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin only appearing publicly hours after the drama began, leaving the Communications Minister in front of the cameras.
Ny Breaking Australia revealed that on the day of the crisis, Ms Rosmarin’s $15 million Sydney home was the scene of an elaborate photo shoot.
More to come.