The telco, which admitted it took longer than it could have favored to research the trigger, mentioned routers disconnected from its core community after the upkeep.
“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 these routers disconnecting from the Optus IP Core community to guard themselves.”
However, two experts say Optus hasn’t fully explained the cause of the downtime, and believe several questions remain unanswered.
“The trigger recognized by Optus for the nationwide outage final Wednesday morning was human error,” RMIT associate professor Mark Gregory said.
“The Optus assertion is poorly worded, however it seems that a routine software program improve to a number of key routers was the reason for the outage.
“Optus has not explained what went wrong with the test process that should have occurred before the routing software upgrade occurred.
“Also, there is no such thing as a clarification as to why there seems to have been an absence of redundancy of the important thing routers, in order that if there was an issue the important thing routers would swap to the redundant routers, which you’d anticipate to be operating the earlier iteration of software program.
“There remains a number of open questions that Optus has failed to explain, but we now know that the Optus outage was not hardware failure and not related to a cyberattack.”
Mark Stewart, a analysis fellow on the Centre for Defence Communications and Information Networking at The University of Adelaide, agreed.
“A major telco should have a disaster recovery plan which is more sophisticated than your average corporate network,” he mentioned.
“At a minimum, they should have had a plan to revert the changes, or remotely reboot their systems.
“The assertion from Optus on no account clarifies how this occasion was distinctive, or what preventative measures they’d in place to mitigate the influence.”
The Optus spokesperson said some of the routers had to be manually reset, which is why it took so long to fix the 13-hour outage.
“The restoration required a large-scale effort of the staff and in some instances required Optus to reconnect or reboot routers bodily, requiring the dispatch of individuals throughout quite a few websites in Australia,” the spokesperson said.
“This is why restoration was progressive over the afternoon.
“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 restoration of the community was always our precedence and we subsequently established the trigger working along with our companions.
“We have made changes to the network to address this issue so that it cannot occur again.”
The outage on Wednesday left a lot of Optus’ roughly 10 million clients with out web and telephone connectivity, and impacted their skill to contact emergency companies.
The authorities has introduced an inquiry into the outage, which Optus mentioned it would cooperate with.
“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,” the spokesperson mentioned.
“We will also support and will fully cooperate with the reviews being undertaken by the government and the Senate.”
Source: www.9news.com.au
