The recent outage that brought down Optus’s internet and mobile services across Australia has left many customers frustrated and disconnected. While the exact cause of the outage remains under investigation, experts suggest it may have been triggered by the same issue that caused Facebook’s massive outage in 2021.
Cloudflare, a company that tracks internet activity, observed a surge in Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) announcements from Optus around the time the outage began. BGP serves as a roadmap for internet traffic, directing data packets to the most efficient routes.
According to Matt Tett, managing director of network analysis company Enex TestLab, the spike in BGP announcements suggests that Optus experienced a routing failure at approximately 4 a.m. This failure led to an exponential increase in BGP announcements, overwhelming the network and causing widespread outages.
Tett further explained that Optus engineers likely had to physically access and reconfigure network routers to resolve the issue. The outage affected not only internet services but also landline and mobile services due to the integrated nature of modern IP-based networks.
The possibility of a cyberattack initially crossed many minds given Optus’s previous data breach. However, Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin dismissed this notion, emphasizing that such an outage was “highly unlikely” and that network disruptions of this scale were rare occurrences.
Optus, one of Australia’s three major mobile network operators, is aware of the critical role its network plays in people’s lives and the importance of maintaining its uptime. In its latest annual report, Optus’s parent company, Singtel, highlighted its efforts to enhance network infrastructure diversity to minimize disruptions and downtime.
While the cause of the outage remains to be definitively determined, experts’ insights suggest that a routing failure similar to the one that affected Facebook in 2021 may have been the culprit. Optus is working to fully restore its services and prevent future occurrences through network improvements and redundancy measures.