(Reuters) – Singapore Telecommunications Ltd, the parent of Australian telecoms provider Optus, said on Thursday its planned software update was not the root cause for an outage last week, contradicting Optus’ claims earlier this week. More than 10 million Australians were hit by the 12-hour network blackout at the Singapore Telecommunications-owned (SingTel) telecom firm on … Read more
One week after the service outage that affected about 10 million customers country-wide, including businesses, Optus apologised for the disruption it caused. Optus said the 14-hour-long disruption was caused by “changes to routing information from an international peering network following a software upgrade”. In a statement on its website, the company gave a step-by-step detailed … Read more
Hanson-Young will chair the Senate hearing, to be heard under the auspices of the Senate Standing Committees on Environment and Communications. It’s the first of a number of probes into the outage including post-incident reviews by both the Communications Department and communications watchdog, the Australian Communications Media Authority. Last week’s outage left some 10 million … Read more
Australia’s biggest telecommunications provider Telstra claimed it has gained new customers following the 14-hour Optus outage last week, but the exact number of disappointed customers who were inconvencienced was yet to be determined. Speaking at Telstra’s annual investor day yesterday, Telstra CEO Vicki Brady said it was a similar experience to last year Optus’ hack. … Read more
1. Respond quickly It took almost five hours after the outage for the Optus CEO to pick up the phone and call Communications Minister Michelle Rowland. It took another two hours – seven hours after the crisis began – for the company to respond publicly in a meaningful way. It meant Rowland and other federal … Read more
Early last Wednesday morning, Adrian Ashenden spent 15 minutes immobile on the floor “preoccupied with staying alive” while his wife frantically tried to call an ambulance. Key points: Optus landlines and some mobile phones could not dial triple-0 during the outage The regulator is investigating Optus’s failure to connect some emergency calls Tomorrow a Senate … Read more
The third party Optus blamed for its network shutdown last week has been revealed as the telco’s parent company, Singtel. On Monday Optus released a statement explaining the outage saying, “At around 4:05am Wednesday morning, the Optus network received changes to routing information from an international peering network following a routine software upgrade”. Peering is … Read more
The Albanese government’s hand-picked national cybersecurity coordinator, Air Marshall Darren Goldie, has been told to return to Defence over a “workplace matter”, leaving the Department of Home Affairs with both its secretary and cyber chief now sidelined, just as the agency tries to push-up new enabling legislation giving it more power over telecommunications carriers. In … Read more
The peering network that contributed to the Optus outage last week has been revealed as its Singapore-based parent company Singtel. On Monday Optus released a statement explaining the meltdown saying, “At around 4.05 am Wednesday morning, the Optus network received changed to routing information from an international peering network following a routine software upgrade”. Peering … Read more