Optus revealed that a “routine software upgrade” triggered the outage that crippled the country last week, saying it has taken steps to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
The collapse affected up to 10 million Australians and more than 400,000 businesses who were left in the dark for up to 12 hours after their internet and phone services were cut.
Optus told disgruntled customers on Monday afternoon that it was trying to find out what went wrong and insisted it had “taken steps to ensure this doesn’t happen again”.
“We sincerely apologize for letting our customers down and for the inconvenience this has caused,” the statement said.
Optus revealed on Monday afternoon that its massive nationwide outage, which affected up to 10 million Australians last week, was triggered by a software upgrade.
Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin (pictured) was criticized for not publicly addressing the outage until several hours into the crisis.
“At approximately 4:05 a.m. on Wednesday morning, the Optus network received changes to routing information from an international peering network following a routine software upgrade,” the statement explained.
“These changes to routing information propagated through multiple layers of our network and exceeded predefined security levels on key routers that could not handle them.”
The statement said the action caused many routers to automatically disconnect from the Optus IP Core network to protect themselves.
This resulted in a large-scale effort to physically reconnect or reboot routers, requiring “sending people to a number of sites in Australia”.
The struggling telecoms operator said that was why some people were able to log in earlier than others last Wednesday.
“Given the widespread impact of the outage. Investigations into the matter took longer than we would have liked, as we considered several different paths to restoration,” the statement said.
The outage prevented millions of people from making and receiving calls and carrying out transactions, with CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin only appearing publicly several hours after the drama began, leaving the communications minister in front of the cameras.
Daily Mail Australia revealed that on the day of the crisis, Ms Rosmarin’s $15 million Sydney home was the scene of an elaborate photoshoot.
