The Optus outage that stopped ten million angry Australians from accessing the internet could be due to a glitch during an internal update.
Early signs indicate that a “misconfiguration” of the telco’s border gateway protocol (BGP) routers caused Wednesday’s more than nine-hour nationwide meltdown.
Customers using the Optus network were unable to access the internet from 4am until around 1pm, although it took until 6pm for service to be fully restored to all users.
The outage was so serious that NSW Police urged family and friends of ‘vulnerable community members’ to contact them personally as a large number of callers had been unable to access Triple Zero.
Technology expert Trevor Long told Ny Breaking Australia it was “the largest telecommunications disruption in Australian history”.
BGP is an essential factor in the global movement of Internet traffic, which has been likened to the way GPS systems tell self-driving cars where to go.
Customers using the Optus network were unable to access the internet from 4am until approximately 1pm, although it took until 6pm for service to be fully restored to all users
More than 10 million Optus customers were left in the dark after being hit by the ‘worst telecommunications disruptions in Australian history’ (stock image)
“It’s like all the GPS systems going out all at once, so all the cars on the road don’t know where to go and so they just stop,” a private IT consultant who asked not to be named told Ny Breaking Australia.
As a network provider, Optus needs its own BGP to direct its users’ attempts to visit web pages or send chats and emails to the correct internet addresses.
Whenever users try to reach a website or send a message, the BGP bundles data into ‘packets’ allowing the flow of information to flow successfully in both directions.
In this case, a ‘misconfiguration’ is believed to mean that there has been an error in the way Optus’ BGP system works.
That put an end to the essential back-and-forth exchange of Internet addresses.
While it is unclear what exactly caused the BGP issue, the IT consultant said it was an internal issue (possibly because a system update introduced a bug) or an external denial of service type attack.
The latter is considered unlikely but cannot be ruled out, says Mike Bareja, deputy director of Cyber, Technology and Security at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.
“It’s unlikely this would have been a malicious cyber attack, but we won’t know the answer until a really thorough forensic analysis is done.”
Previously, Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin said a “technical network error” was responsible, but would not elaborate.
‘It’s a very technical explanation for what happened. There’s no soundbite that will do it justice, so we really want to get to the root cause and when we have that very clearly and in a digestible form, we’ll come out.”
Earlier, Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin said a “technical network error” was responsible, but would not say more
That was after Communications Minister Michelle Rowland blamed a “deep flaw” in the network during a media conference on Wednesday morning.
Mr Long, a high-profile commentator on Australian technology since 2007, said it was likely Ms Rowland had no further information to describe what was “a monumental problem with the Optus network”.
“We have never had an outage in a mobile network that also extended to the same telecom company’s broadband network,” he added.
The IT consultant said the fact that there was a problem with the BGP system is not important because Optus cannot quickly resolve the problem.
Tech expert Trevor Long (pictured) said the minister was most likely trying to describe a ‘monumental problem with the Optus’ network, while the problem remains unknown and unresolved
“You wouldn’t think they would have just one system, they would have to have a failsafe and a backup.”
BGP systems should act like a network of networks, he said, so that when a route to an IP address fails, the data can be sent and received via a different path.
The massive outage will do little to restore the beleaguered Telco reputation, which was hit by a major data breach thirteen months ago.
In June this year, Roy Morgan named Optus ‘the most distrusted brand in Australia’, ahead of Facebook/Meta and Telstra.