Submitted 1 year ago by YodaDaCoda@sh.itjust.works to australia@aussie.zone
Optus mobile services are down across the country, affecting millions of Australian customers and businesses.
The outage was first reported at around 4am AEDT, with Optus customers across the country taking to social media to find out what was happening.
Mobile phones are unable to make and receive calls and mobile internet services are also down.
Optus has now confirmed triple-0 calls will not work from an Optus landline.
How can you fuck up designing your system this badly?
Huge number of landlines now go through SIP tunnels over the NBN… so if your internet is down, no phone calls, not even emergency unless you have purposefully designed your network with failover to another provider. the few remaining physical landline connections become data at some point now too, so if that backend goes down, not even the emergency calls will go through.
Many of the consumer routers supplied by the ISPs now have failover to a 4g/5g connection, but it’s always the same network of course, so the failover is useless unless there’s some actual work done by the providers in allowing emergency failover to their competitors.
Yeah, I did think about this more and realised it was NBN-based. But that’s kind of worse, at least on the NBNs part. Their systems would have noticed pretty quickly that they weren’t getting any traffic from Optus anymore. There’s no technical barrier that would stop them from being able to provide a failover endpoint to route outgoing emergency calls. Instead though, they spent how many millions on the bullshit backup batteries in fibre installs on the pretence that would help with emergency calls. All those batteries that die after 2 years, then the modem helpfully screeching regularly to let you know. Even if they spent all that money for a backup that only gets used on days like today, it would still have been more worthwhile.
Many of the consumer routers supplied by the ISPs now have failover to a 4g/5g connection, but it’s always the same network of course, so the failover is useless unless there’s some actual work done by the providers in allowing emergency failover to their competitors.
You’re completely talking out of your arse here though. That’s not how GSM networks or devices work at all. Optus mobile customers were still able to make 000 calls through competing operators. That is an international standard for GSM, and has been since the days of 2G. You can travel to ~80% of the world with your aussie mobile, dial 000 (yes, even in the US. yes, 911 works on an aussie mobile in Australia too) and if there’s a local operators signal, it will go through. You don’t even need to have a SIM card. There are provisions for data-only devices, but those routers can do calls over the 4G backup. If the device supports phone calls at all, it needs to support emergency calls through all available carriers to be compliant.
Thanks mate that’s a much better link, edited the post
No probs; gotta support our ABC!
Whirlpool sometimes has leaked technical information about outages or other insights: forums.whirlpool.net.au/thread/96n1w7m9
The facts here are that the core mobile infrastructure, the core broadband infrastructure and the core landline infrastructure are all down.
This doesn’t feel like a “whoops, misconfigured a route”.
This feels like a coordinated attack against multiple (theoretically) separate systems.
That's a very generous and optimistic view of Optus' processes and infrastructure dependencies. I'm unsure why you would assume they're in any way robust, especially considering Optus' history.
What a disaster of a company, not sure why anyone would stay with Optus after the last year. I’m sure they will continue to advertise very heavily like they didn’t after their security failure last time
Optus is pretty much the only mobile provider that’s viable at my place. Telstra barely gets me one bar of coverage and mobile data speeds of less than 1Mbit/s. I don’t trust Vodafone’s coverage map as far as I can spit against the wind, but the one time I tried Vodafone out here it was useless.
So yeah, why would anyone stay with Optus? Show me a viable alternative and I’m gone.
Unfortunately I suspect Telstra is simply “there but for the geace of god go I”.
I miss Telecom.
2CatsOneBowl@aussie.zone 1 year ago
I’m just astounded that there’s a single point of failure for all mobile and Internet customers…
Salvo@aussie.zone 1 year ago
And that there is so much government infrastructure that relies on a consumer-based, foreign owned commercial company.
Why aren’t all these things hard-wired.