Optus has identified the cause of the nationwide outage last Wednesday, which shut its entire network down for about 7 hours, leaving 10 million Australians without phone service or access to the internet.
Multiple layers in the network exceeded preset safety levels on key routers which could not handle the changes and therefore a number of them disconnected from the core network to protect themselves.
The statement by Optus shows it was not a malicious attack which the government has been saying for days.
Optus’ upgrades caused a flow-on effect and they are working to prevent this from ever happening again.
The telecommunications company said in a statement this afternoon: “The Optus network received changes to routing information from an international peering network following a routine software upgrade. These routing information changes propagated through multiple layers in our network and exceeded preset safety levels on key routers which could not handle these. This resulted in those routers disconnecting from the Optus IP Core network to protect themselves.”