Telstra and iiNet customers are not happy campers this afternoon after both networks suffered a severe network outage, forcing potentially millions offline.
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Telstra’s entire network suffered an outage which began around 1:55pm this afternoon- from its Next G mobile service, fixed line broadband, BigPond mail service as well as connection to international sites.
And its all Dodo’s, fault, apparently.
The CEO of ISP Dodo, Larry Kestelman, said one of its (minor) network routers “was causing an issue between ourselves and Telstra, that’s had larger ramifications than it should have with other providers,” he told Gizmodo.
“Even though everything is up and running now, the two companies are still investigating the root cause of the problem.”
Disgruntled Telstra users were met with ‘No Internet Connection’ according to Whirlpool community bloggers, who began posting problems just before 2pm today, and the service outage hit all main metro areas including Sydney, Adelaide, Brisbane, Canberra and Gold Coast.
Telstra phones were showing 3G data connected, but there was no data movement.
“Not working in Canberra either it seems.. Both iPad/iPhone no workies :-(“, one Telstra user said.
Another said: “Next-G down, Cable down, adsl down. Nationwide.”
“Telstra is down. No data,” another forlorn Internet-less user declared. (Check out #Telstra Outage on Twitter for more tweets).
Optus and the Commonwealth Bank were also said to be hit by the network problem.
“Telstra lost connectivity progressively to its international data network at around 1.40 this afternoon meaning customers could not access international websites from either their mobile or fixed services,” a company spokesperson confirmed.
“Customers who couldn’t access international sites were then overloading domestic sites causing major issues in accessing Australian sites as well.
However, the “vast majority” of customers have been progressively coming back on line since 2.25pm this afternoon and Telstra’s engineers are continuing to monitor the network and identify the cause, the spokesperson added.
“We are also experiencing a high volume of calls to our customer service centres which means some customers may be having difficulties getting through at this time.
“Customers accessing our online services may also be experiencing difficulties. We will continue to keep our customers updated.”
And across at Perth based telco, iiNet, it too was experiencing similar issues related to the Telstra outage, across its network since 10:52am Western Standard Time.
“Customers trying to access external websites and services may experience delays and timeouts. iiNet Upstream provider is currently investigating.” according to a notice posted on the company website.
However, it is unclear how many users were affected.
Engineers are working on the “majority of issues and estimated time of restoration is today at 17:00:00 WST”, it confirmed.
