Optus: Access ‘remains stable’ following major outage

Customers were unable to access overseas streaming and gaming services last night

Credit: Dreamstime

Optus says access to international internet, streaming and gaming services “remains stable” following a major outage affecting customers last night.

A company spokesperson said the company is continuing to test and monitor network performance following an “overnight issue” which left a large number of unable to access overseas sites and applications.

This morning the company said access to a majority of those sites and services had been restored, at lunchtime access was “continuing to stabilise” and as of this afternoon, performance and access “remain stable”.

“We are pleased to report that access to those platforms and websites remains stable, however, we encourage customers to contact us if they have other issues they require assistance with,” a spokesperson said.

Many customers were first made aware of the outage when they sat down to watch streaming services and play online games last night. A number reported resetting their TVs and consoles believing them to be at fault.

Optus’ own service troubleshooting page was affected by the outage.

It is unclear exactly what caused the outage, or how many people were affected. The company said it would provide another update on the outage at 8pm tonight.

Optus’ social media channels were bombarded with complaints. Many called for compensation for the time without service.

A separate unrelated outage affected iiNet customers in Applecross, Jindalee and Mullaloo in Western Australia last night also. The ISP said it was caused by a fibre break in the Perth area which had impacted multiple links to exchanges.

The issue was resolved by the early hours of this morning, iiNet said.

It is not the first time Optus has suffered major issues with its services. The company last year was forced to strike an agreement with SBS to air FIFA World Cup matches following problems with its Optus Sport streaming service.

Optus CEO Allen Lew said the meltdown had been compounded by a failure in a “critical part of our content delivery network”.

The telco had been using two different CDNs and one suffered a “critical failure” between the encoder and the packager, he said. “We’ve learned from that issue,” the CEO said at the time.

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