Optus outage in Australia (November 2023)
An outage of Australian carrier Optus' network on November 8, 2023, which left more than ten million people without phone or internet for about twelve hours.
A carrier's routers protect themselves: beyond a set number of received routes, they isolate themselves to avoid exhausting their memory. That safeguard, set by default by the manufacturer, becomes a mechanism for total failure when a flood of routes from a neighboring network makes every router isolate at once. The carrier is then left without a network, and often has to restart equipment one unit at a time, on site, because remote access runs over the network that is down. For insurance, the event is a reminder that a single dependency can strike consumers, hospitals and payment networks all at once. It also shows the cause being disputed between subsidiary and parent company, which complicates any recourse.
On November 8, 2023, starting at 4:05 a.m. Sydney time, about 90 Optus edge routers isolated themselves after a flood of routing information following a software upgrade at an internet exchange of its parent Singtel in North America; more than ten million Australians lost service for twelve to thirteen hours. Singtel disputed that the upgrade was the root cause, and Optus' chief executive resigned on November 20, 2023.
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