An Australian IT firm suggests a nationwide outage stemmed from a ‘configuration issue
Experts propose that the extensive outage affecting Optus’s internet and mobile services nationwide might be linked to the same problem that led to Facebook’s shutdown two years ago. Cloudflare, a company monitoring various internet activities, observed an increase in Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) announcements from the telco, aligning with the period when Optus’s network experienced disruption.
BGP serves as a navigational guide for the internet, with the announcements conveying the most efficient route to a specific destination.
Matt Tett, the managing director of network analysis firm Enex TestLab, informed Guardian Australia that although he cannot definitively confirm the cause, it seems that Optus encountered a routing failure at 4 am, resulting in a significant rise in BGP announcements.
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He mentioned that the company likely had to deploy an engineer to physically connect to one of the routers for resolution.
“Optus is likely attempting to identify responsibility and ascertain whether it’s an internal issue or involves a partner collaborating on service provision,” he explained. The outage affecting not only the internet but also landline and mobile services occurred because contemporary networks are IP-based. Consequently, when an issue arises in the internet protocol network, it inevitably disrupts all associated systems.
In 2021, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram experienced a five-hour outage due to a BGP-related problem. Facebook attributed the disruption to a configuration change in the backbone routers coordinating network traffic between the company’s data centers. This configuration change had a cascading effect, leading to a halt in Facebook services.
Drawing a parallel to the Facebook incident, resolving such issues for a global company can be time-consuming. Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin informed the ABC that Optus engineers attempted various restoration approaches to bring mobile and internet services back online but had not yet achieved the desired results.
We considered several hypotheses, and thus far, each one we’ve tested and implemented new measures for has not addressed the underlying problem.
Following Optus’s extensively reported hack last year, which exposed the personal information of 10 million customers, many immediately considered the possibility of another cyber-attack. However, Bayer Rosmarin dismissed the likelihood of a hack causing the outage, stating it was “highly unlikely.” She emphasized that such outages are “very, very rare occurrences.”
As one of Australia’s three mobile network operators, Optus recognizes the critical dependence people have on its network and the necessity for measures to ensure its stability. Optus’s parent company, Singtel, noted in its recent annual report that the company had “implemented key network infrastructure diversity” to mitigate the risk of network disruptions and downtime.