Optus network outage may have been caused by same issue

Optus network outage may have been caused by same issue that brought Facebook down in 2021

Australian IT company says ‘configuration issue’ may have been behind nationwide outage

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The lengthy outage of Optus’s internet and mobile services across the country could have been caused by the same issue that brought down Facebook two years ago, experts suggest.

Cloudflare, which tracks a range of activity on the internet, noticed a spike in Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) announcements from the telco coinciding with the time Optus’s network went offline.

BGP effectively acts as a roadmap for the internet, and the announcements tell the rest of the internet the easiest way to a particular location.

Matt Tett, managing director of network analysis company Enex TestLab, told Guardian Australia that while he was not certain of the cause, Optus appears to have had some failure in routeing at 4am that caused an exponential increase in BGP announcements.

“This morning when I woke up, I just instinctively thought: it’s either a cyber incident or a configuration issue. And nine times out of 10 it’s a configuration issue when you have such a big issue like that.”

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He said the company would probably have had to send an engineer to actually physically connect to one of the routers to get it working.

“Optus are probably trying to pinpoint who is responsible and determine whether it is them or someone else,” he said, adding that it could be a partner the company works with on service provision.

The reason why it brought down not just internet but also landline and mobile services, Tett said, is because networks are now IP-based and when the internet protocol network has an issue, “absolutely, it will take down all their systems”.

Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram went offline for five hours in 2021 due to an issue with BGP. Facebook at the time said it was a configuration change to the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between the company’s datacentres – which had a cascading effect – that brought Facebook services to a halt.

In the case of the Facebook outage, it took a long time for the global company to fix the issue. Similarly, the CEO of Optus, Kelly Bayer Rosmarin, told the ABC that engineers at Optus had tried “a number of paths of restoration” to bring mobile and internet services back online, but “so far we have not had the results that we hoped for”.

When will Optus' outage be fixed and what caused it? Your Optus questions answered

One of the country's largest telecommunications networks is slowly coming back online after experiencing a massive nationwide outage on mobile and broadband devices.

With banks, hospitals, and businesses affected, the blackout struck millions of Optus customers.

So how long has the outage been going, and how long will it last?

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READ MORE: Hospitals, banks and businesses 'crippled' as Optus outage hits millions

Has the Optus Outage affected you? 

How long has Optus been down?

Optus users began reporting outages at 4.05am on Wednesday morning.

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 Customers have been unable to make calls or access mobile data since then.

Users on both mobile, landline and broadband networks were hit by the outage, which lasted about nine hours before some services began to be restored.

Optus Mobile customers are reporting their phones showing SOS on the signal indicator, which is a sign that your regular network is down, but that your phone has access to alternate networks in the event of an emergency call.

The shutdown is the longest, and largest in recent memory.

Speaking to 2GB at 12:30pm, Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin said the company had "a path to restoring the whole network."

"We're bringing it up progressively as we speak."

For more details follow this link.