The recent and extended disruption of Optus’s internet and mobile services across Australia has raised speculations among experts that it could be attributed to a comparable issue that afflicted Facebook in 2021.
Cloudflare, a firm that monitors internet activities, observed a surge in Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) announcements originating from Optus at the same time the telco’s network encountered downtime. BGP essentially functions as a navigational tool for the internet, informing the rest of the internet about the most efficient route to specific destinations.
While the exact cause remains unconfirmed, Matt Tett, the managing director of network analysis company Enex TestLab, has suggested that Optus may have encountered routing failures around 4 a.m., leading to a significant increase in BGP announcements. Such a scenario is commonly indicative of a configuration issue.
Tett further elaborated that rectifying such problems often necessitates an engineer to physically establish a connection with one of the routers. He added that Optus is likely working to pinpoint the responsible party, as it may be an external partner involved in service provision.
The far-reaching impact of the Optus outage, affecting internet, landline, and mobile services, can be attributed to modern networks being based on internet protocol (IP). Consequently, when the internet protocol network experiences problems, it leads to the disruption of the entire system.
It’s worth noting that Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram encountered a five-hour outage in 2021 due to a BGP issue. At the time, Facebook attributed the problem to a configuration change in the backbone routers coordinating network traffic between the company’s data centers, resulting in a widespread service disruption.
The extended duration of the Facebook outage is somewhat reminiscent of Optus’s recent challenges. Kelly Bayer Rosmarin, Optus’s CEO, revealed that engineers had explored multiple avenues to restore mobile and internet services without the desired results. While cybersecurity concerns emerged due to a previous hacking incident involving Optus, Rosmarin suggested that a similar breach was unlikely and that outages of this scale are indeed rare occurrences.
As one of Australia’s three major mobile network operators, Optus recognizes the significance of network reliability and has taken measures to diversify its network infrastructure to prevent disruptions and downtime, as detailed in Singtel, Optus’s parent company’s annual report.
Efforts to glean further insights from Cloudflare and Optus regarding the specific issue are ongoing, and Guardian Australia is awaiting their responses.
The Optus network’s recent disruption highlights the ongoing challenges associated with maintaining the integrity of digital infrastructure in the modern era.
