Webwaves

Outage

On Wednesday 8 November 2023, millions of Optus customers were affected by a mobile and internet outage. Starting at 04:05 AEDT and lasting approximately nine hours, the outage was caused by an unknown technical problem, possibly a software or system update gone wrong. Unlike in 2022 when Optus suffered a cyber attack, as discussed in Webwaves PV 221, the outage is not believed to have been the result of malicious activity.

While 000 calls were not possible from landlines, mobile phones were able to place emergency calls by roaming using other carriers, where coverage existed. Problems arising from the outage were widespread, with Melbourne’s train services briefly stopping, Optus dependent EFTPOS services failing and various government services down.

So far, Optus has responded by providing customers with additional or unlimited data until the end of 2023, or faster speeds (unless you are on one of the >35 ineligible plans listed on their website). I suppose customers will be hoping that the network is outage-free for the next few months so that they can actually make use of these token gestures from Optus.

How to find out if there is a network issue

Other than jumping on social media, various internet tools exist to check if websites and networks are down. Downdetector https://downdetector.com/ crowd sources information on outages based on user reports as well as social media scraping. Cloudflare, as providers of content delivery network and cyber security services, hosts the Cloudflare Radar website https://radar.cloudflare.com/AU which aggregates anonymous information from their global network. Data from the Optus network in Australia is shown in Figure 1, with the orange shaded portion of the graph highlighting the outage and impact to services.

Figure 1 . Optus network traffic trends (from Cloudflare Radar).

Cloudflare Radar also provides information on outages at a global level, with a map view as shown in Figure 2. Globally, outages in the last year have had various causes, from weather and natural disasters to cut cables, power cuts to cyber-attacks, government directed outages to military actions. Outages have been widespread, with a large number of countries affected.

Figure 2 . Cloudflare Radar global map of outages in the last 12 months.

With so much of life relying on the internet, it is sometimes difficult to remember that something as simple as a cut cable can potentially result in being unable to dial 000, as shown by the issues with Optus this week, or even being unable to pay for a coffee.