Yesterday was a day of electronic turmoil, as a Telstra outage in Victoria hit some key businesses – including Oz Lotto’s $50 million jackpot numbers game – and broadband web site, Whirlpool, went down after being repeatedly targeted in a denial of service attack.
The so-far-unexplained Telstra outage hit at 1.40pm, knocking out Oz Lotto agency systems across Melbourne just as lunchtime crowds sought to place their bets on the massive Tuesday night draw. The system was rectified at 3.22pm.
Telstra posted a Twitter feed: ” The service outages in Victoria are still being investigated – we will keep you updated with progress as we receive further reports.”
Meanwhile Whirlpool had experienced more than 10 hours downtime as it battled the DDoS attack. The attack originated in Denmark and the US, according to the web site’s hosting service, Bulletproof Networks.
The service was re-established after Bulletproof’s upstream providers, Internode and Pacific Network, blocked the attacks further upstream.
Executives at Whirlpool and Bulletproof were at a loss to explain why the broadband discussion site had been targeted.