what is a ‘deep network’ outage and what may have caused it?
- Written by Paul Haskell-Dowland, Professor of Cyber Security Practice, Edith Cowan University
Optus customers woke up this morning to find they were unable to get their social media fix, and they weren’t happy. Around 4am AEDT, customers started to report an inability to access both mobile and home internet services.
Optus advised it was investigating the issue, with reports emerging around midday of some services coming back online.
The mobile network distributed via cell towers provides both phone calls and data to customers.
Daria Nipot/Shutterstock
As for how such a fault may happen, it is likely due to human error (especially since 4am is a time you might expect engineers to be carrying out patch work). However, it could also be a result of other factors, such as a hardware fault that then causes a software failure.
Another possibility is a fault in an accounting or user management system, such as no longer being able to attribute costs or verify users’ identities properly.
Issues in back-end billing and management systems can generate a cascade of failures throughout the rest of a network. In such cases, a simple bug in the system can impact everyone connected to the network.
How will this be fixed?
Optus engineers will be actively investigating the cause of the outage. You might be imagining someone scurrying around with wires in their hands trying to find the one that isn’t plugged in – but in reality this will be a lengthy process that involves examining various systems and software configurations to find the culprit.
For Optus, the hard work will continue after the fix is in place to ensure it doesn’t happen again. And perhaps an even more difficult challenge will be convincing the public this was an isolated incident – one that has once again highlighted how vulnerable our massively connected systems are to (even single) points of failure.
Speaking on 3AW Afternoons, Bayer Rosmarin said:
We are looking at what we can do to say thank you to our customers for their patience.
Optus is likely to pay compensation to customers. For residential customers this may be in the form of a reduced bill.
For business customers, the compensation would be linked with their service-level agreements. In other words, the specific penalties for Optus will be based on individual agreements it has made with various parties using or sharing its services.
Beyond this, it’s highly likely today’s events have dealt a massive blow to Optus’s reputation – especially when considered alongside last year’s Optus data breach.
Read more:
Optus says it needed to keep identity data for six years. But did it really?
Authors: Paul Haskell-Dowland, Professor of Cyber Security Practice, Edith Cowan University 
