"We apologise sincerely": Cause of major Optus outage revealed
Optus have finally shared the reason behind the major outage that crippled Australia last week, while laying out the steps they are taking to prevent further disruptions to the network.
A statement from Optus cited a "routine software upgrade" as the trigger for the outage, which affected up to 10 million Australians and 400,000 businesses, who were cut off from the network for 12 hours.
On Monday afternoon, Optus told its disgruntled customers it had spent the last six days trying to discover what went wrong and insisted they had "taken steps to ensure it will not happen again".
"We apologise sincerely for letting our customers down and the inconvenience it caused," the statement said.
"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 action meant millions of routers disconnected from the core network, resulting in a large-scale logistical effort to reconnect or reboot the routers physically, requiring "the dispatch of people across a number of sites in Australia".
"Given the widespread impact of the outage, investigations into the issue took longer than we would have liked as we examined several different paths to restoration," the statement said.
The outage meant millions of homes were disconnected, with many people also not able to call 000 in an emergency.
For compensation of the disruption the outage caused, Optus customers were offered an extra 200GB of data for their "patience and loyalty".
But Federal Labor minister Bill Shorten said on Friday the extra data wouldn't "touch the sides" of customer frustration.
"The telecommunications industry ombudsman can assist small businesses who are dissatisfied with the responses, I would encourage those customers to keep records, to document the impacts of the outage on them, but it was a nightmare for everyone," he told Sydney radio station 2GB.
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