Dodo chief says Telstra to blame for major internet outage

Hundreds of thousands of internet users were left without access to the web for about 40 minutes yesterday after a hardware fault spread through telecommunications infrastructure across the country. But there is still some confusion as to what happened and who is to blame.

Dodo Australia admitted yesterday a hardware fault on its networks caused an outage to spread, affecting users on Telstra and iiNet networks. However, chief executive Larry Kestelman says the root cause of the outage was Telstra’s problem.

“The way it’s been explained to me is that what was a minor technical fault on our network affected the Telstra network, due to them not having the right safeguards in place,” Kestelman told SmartCompany this morning.

“The issue had to do with loading routes and my understanding is that Telstra was supposed to have safeguards in place that weren’t there. We’re working with them to find the root cause.”

“This kind of thing can happen – it’s a technical glitch.”

Telstra was contacted this morning for comment but a reply was not available prior to publication.

However, Ovum research director David Kennedy suggests such a technical glitch is extremely rare.

“There is a reference to a generic hardware issue, but as to how it could lead to a major outage…I’m not sure. It doesn’t necessarily sound like a hardware issue, perhaps more of a software issue.”

“All I can say at the moment is that it appears we don’t have enough information of what’s occurred and people are still looking for clarification.”

However, Kennedy says the failure does suggest there are some issues with network fail safes.

“It does certainly seem there are some issues with fail safes on the network in the current way they are set up.”