Australia's Internet goes down for an hour
THE FACT that Australia is largely dependant on just one ISP resulted in the whole country disappearing from the world wide wibble yesterday.
The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Telstra's national Internet network went down for an hour, as the company admitted.
The outage affected all Telstra home and businesses broadband and mobile internet customers nationwide, between 7.50am and 8.50am, a Telstra spokesman said.
The company formed a major incident response team to investigate the outage. It's not yet known precisely what caused it.
Telstra customers could not access any international sites or Australian sites containing international links. Since Telstra's customers also include most Aussie ISPs, most of the country was affected.
The problem apparently was caused by Telstra's international gateway, which lost the ability to find the domain names of international websites.
However, if punters did not want to look beyond the Great Rabbit Proof Fence of OZ they were okay.
We reckon that once the source of the problem was found, technicians solved it by switching it off and back on again.
It was the biggest outage Telstra has ever experienced and it shows the vulnerability of Australia's Internet infrastructure and its international connections.
Telstra is similar to British Telecom in that it started out in life as a public monopoly. It faced competition in the 1990s only from Optus and a few smaller providers.
However it still controls the entire fixed-line telephone network down under, as well as one of two competing pay-TV and data cable networks. Only Optus, Transact and a few others have installed their own infrastructure - all the others have to negotiate with and connect through Telstra.
Yesterday's outage showed that Telstra seems to be dependant on one international gateway and therefore all of the country's eggs are in one basket. µ
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I hadn't even noticed that Botany Bay had gone missing.
We actually all got into a huddle for an hour to ponder our cricket woes.
The guy working at Telstra was there so the the link to the outside world went down while we had a coffee and a cry.
No drama.
Jeesh ...
The shutdown was punishment for Prime Minister John Howard's statement "victory for Democratic Sen. Barack Obama and his party in next year's presidential election would be a boon for terrorists."
Don't take it personally. Obama was just doing what he was told by his playbook, Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. Obama's close friend Hugo Chavez instructed him to do this so it is not his fault.
:P
that would go down on most of the Aussies I've met.
Boom Boom
Sources say the 'net wasn't shut off and on, the net temporarily and spontaneously censored OZ. After all, it makes no sense that a website in OZ was inaccessable for simply containing a link to an off-continent site.
...meanwhile the rest of internet users in australia were unaffected
no one in their right mind would sign up to telstra services or isp dependant on telstra wholesale
Several ISPs use Optus' services.
Telstra has the worst choice in broadband packages in the country, and I don't know a single person who actually uses them.
Not only that, but I didn't notice any problems with the Internet at work yesterday when I got in. Perhaps the ISP my work uses is again, not using Telstra's network?
This is also the first I've heard of this... Usually the news sites are on the ball when it comes to reporting something bad. I guess this just wasn't sexy enough. They should have titled the article "Australia's internet access down: Pornography denied to millions of early risers"
I'm sure Telstra's fix for all this is to reduce the amount of data transfer per month even more. Maybe they only need 2.4GB/mo.
in fact what happened
Telstra techs worked over night to change over a DNS and they did not put in a simple back to old one switch over
and yes in best of all possible worlds it did not work
so We had a NET part ie a dos
Denighl of service
it took a while ot wake up the blokes who did the work and get a work around to fix up the snaffu
such is life
Yes i notice it has posted as 7 to 8 in round figures but if u were on line at the time it happened you would not have been affected unlil u went offline
so basicly it took a while to fix especially as everyone who could not log on then kept trying and so sent millians of requests it was all sorted by about 10 thirty
those who think telstra is crap need to realise we are blessed with one of the best services in world
just a pity the basic backbone has had to do work load for whole country for years and with out any help
its a huge country with very spare users people get a life
Yeah our techies are still howling over the problem here as the PM hasn't made his mind up whether to castrate them for breaking the internet or pat them on the back for fixing it.
Evidently some drongo thought if we turned off the internet at our end (like the US are threatening) the rest would go down as well ... leave falling from the tree ... noone there ... didn't happen.
Answer: The rest worked fine and nobody noticed Australia was off-line bar the red flashing light in the smoko room at Telstra (PMG). The boys had to stope their 500 game and do some work ... for a change.
Not happy Jan (John) whatever.
You had an opportunity to blame the whole thing on Apple, but didn't take it. Don't let the lack of facts to back up your rants stop you this time.
I feel ripped off.
I think it's interesting that you can wipe a continent off of the internet with literally, the flip of a switch. Wow.
...the Internet treats damage as censorship, and routes through it?
...or something?
I believe the Australian government has 51% share of Telstra, making it a government sponsored monopoly. In the UK, US, Canada, such monopolies were broken up in order to allow for a market where competition can occur. No such luck in Australia, where internet costs are relatively high and the vast majority of plans are capped at 20gb/month or less. However it looks unlikely to change any time soon.
@"manager"
Mate, "We are blessed with one of the best services in the world"
What a joke. I pay for 5mb/s and get 1. Slow. Painfully unreliable. Terrible service.
There's Telstra for ya.