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Comment by emmelaich | Hacker News Reader

Down for over three hours so far, with no news about the fault. This is the largest internet outage in Australia's history.

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Absolutely. Consumer and enterprise alike, EFTPOS, internet, landlines, mobiles, roaming, all down. Hospitals and train networks heavily impacted as well.

It baffles me how they can have one single point of failure for their entire national cellular + fibre voice & data network, and for it to take so long to fix.

If it’s BGP as is currently believed to be the case, it’s somewhat understandable. Same thing tripped up Facebook not too long ago.

You'd expect there would be redundancy in their core network which is why I'm leaning towards a DNS issue... It's always DNS after all.

How would that explain the voice/phone network being out? And you'd think packets would still be able to make it through the network even without DNS.

It’s BGP, not DNS.

Some sort of DNS issue? Maybe a botched change pushed out network wide? Surely if it was a change pushed out it would be rolled back by now?

Edit: On second thought, if they've got no network & no out-of-band - it may take a while... they may need to physically visit each site to re-install the backed-up version!

it's not DNS - there's no mobile network at all.

I think that’s how they respond to a major issue- they take down all the radio connections while they isolate the issue. Otherwise reconnect attempts will overwhelm the systems

Hm that makes sense.

BGP route reflectors seem to be the problem.

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