An Australian IT firm suggests a “configuration issue” as a potential cause for the nationwide outage.
Experts suggest the prolonged Optus service outage may result from the same problem that affected Facebook two years ago. Cloudflare, an internet activity tracker, observed an increase in Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) announcements from Optus that coincided with the network’s downtime.
BGP functions as the internet’s navigation system, sharing directions to specific destinations. According to Matt Tett, the managing director of Enex TestLab, while he couldn’t confirm the exact cause, it appears that at 4 am, Optus experienced a routing failure that led to a significant surge in BGP announcements. Tett added that when he considered the situation upon waking up, he instinctively thought it was either a cyber incident or a configuration problem, with configuration issues being the more common culprit in such significant problems.
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He mentioned that the company might have needed to dispatch an engineer to physically connect to one of the routers for resolution.
Optus is likely in the process of identifying responsibility, determining whether it’s an internal or external party,” he added, suggesting it could involve a service provider partner.
Tett explained that the reason for the widespread service disruption, affecting not only the internet but also landline and mobile services, is because modern networks are based on the Internet Protocol (IP). When an issue arises in the IP network, it can impact all their systems.
In a similar incident, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram were offline for five hours in 2021 due to a BGP-related problem. Facebook attributed it to a configuration change in the backbone routers that manage network traffic between their data centers, causing a cascading effect.
Resolving the Facebook outage took a considerable amount of time for the global company. Likewise, Kelly Bayer Rosmarin, CEO of Optus, informed the ABC that their engineers had attempted multiple restoration approaches to bring back mobile and internet services, but they had yet to achieve the desired results.
Following last year’s widely publicized Optus data breach, which exposed the personal details of 10 million customers, concerns naturally arose about the possibility of another cyber-attack. However, Bayer Rosmarin emphasized that a hack was “highly unlikely” as the cause of the outage, and she described such outages as “very, very rare incidents.”
As one of the three major mobile network operators in Australia, Optus is acutely aware of the public’s reliance on its network and the necessity of taking measures to ensure its uninterrupted operation. In its most recent annual report, Optus’s parent company, Singtel, mentioned that the company had implemented essential network infrastructure diversity” to prevent network disruptions and downtime.
