Optus has revealed a technical issue was the cause of its 14-hour nationwide outage last Wednesday, adding it had “taken steps to ensure it will not happen again.”
In a statement on Monday, the telecommunications provider again offered its apologies to customers after millions of Australians were suddenly left unable to use their phones, explaining a “routine software upgrade” was the cause of the outage.
“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,” the statement said.
“We apologise sincerely for letting our customers down and the inconvenience it caused.
“At around 4.05am Wednesday morning, the Optus network received changes to routing information from an international peering network following a routine software upgrade.
“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.”
Optus explained restoring its network “required a large-scale effort” which in some cases required technicians to physically reconnect routers, in a process which took “longer than we would have liked.”
The restoration of service occurred progressively over Wednesday afternoon as it had needed to dispatch employees “across a number of sites in Australia” and had to asses “several different paths” to find a solution.
However, the provider insisted restoring the network “was at all times our priority” and that it had now “made changes to the network to address this issue so that it cannot occur again.”
The cause of the outage was discovered following work with Optus’ partners.
On Thursday, Communications Minister Michelle Rowland had urged the telecommunications company to provide a “meaningful” response to the outage and also announced the government would conduct a “post-incident review.”
The provider subsequently announced it was providing affected customers with 200GB of free data by way of apology for the disruption, but CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin backed away from earlier suggestions of compensation.
That prompted backlash from unhappy customers, who attacked the company on social media for its response.
Optus made no reference to compensation in its Monday statement, but said it would “fully cooperate” with any reviews into the outage and the company’s response.
“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,” they wrote.
“We will also support and will fully cooperate with the reviews being undertaken by the Government and the Senate.
“We continue to invest heavily to improve the resiliency of our network and services.”
