Optus has issued a new statement today, offering a further explanation as to last week’s nationwide outage that left 10 million customers without the ability to make phone calls or access the internet.
After citing a “network event” last week – which has also seen the government announce it will launch an investigation into the matter – the telco said it now understands what happened last Wednesday morning.
“We have been working to understand what caused the outage on Wednesday, and we now know what the cause was and have taken steps to ensure it will not happen again. We apologise sincerely for letting our customers down and the inconvenience it caused,” the statement reads.
“At around 4.05am Wednesday morning, the Optus network received changes to routing information from an international peering network following a routine software upgrade.
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“These routing information changes propagated through multiple layers in our network and exceeded preset safety levels on key routers which could not handle these. This resulted in those routers disconnecting from the Optus IP Core network to protect themselves.
“The restoration required a large-scale effort of the team and in some cases required Optus to reconnect or reboot routers physically, requiring the dispatch of people across a number of sites in Australia. This is why restoration was progressive over the afternoon.”
Optus said investigations into the matter took “longer than we would have liked” given that the outage was experienced by millions of its customers and that a number of paths to restoration were explored. It added that changes have been made to the network to ensure the problem could not occur again.
“We are committed to learning from what has occurred and continuing to work with our international vendors and partners to increase the resilience of our network. We will also support and will fully cooperate with the reviews being undertaken by the Government and the Senate,” the statement concludes.
“We continue to invest heavily to improve the resiliency of our network and services.”
Last week, Optus CEO, Kelly Bayer Rosmarin, issued an apology to customers and confirmed that it will offer customers 200GB of extra data from today which can be activated until the end of the year.
Eligible prepaid customers will also be able to access unlimited data on weekends until the end of the year.