Optus has advised its customers this afternoon that it is suffering an outage affecting access to international websites and some gaming platforms.
Customers will notice that certain home automation services – such as Sensibo and Arlo Security cameras – are not working. Other services like Netflix, Plex and the like appear to be sporadically affected.
According to reports on Twitter, the outage has been ongoing since early this afternoon, but Optus has only acknowledged the issue more recently:
We’re aware of an issue currently impacting access to international websites and gaming platforms. Our tech team are currently working on resolving this. We aim to provide an update as soon as possible. We apologise for any inconvenience.
— Optus (@Optus) May 22, 2019
Most local services aren’t impacted, and calls / SMS appear to be working without issue. Home broadband customers (including yours truly) have limited connectivity, with local services working okay (Google, ABC News, Ausdroid) but international services are not. Even Netflix, which has local peering arrangements with most ISPs, cannot be reached on Optus at the time of writing.
We spoke with Optus this evening, and received this comment (largely in line with the tweet above) around 8pm:
“Our technical team is working through an issue impacting access to some websites. We aim to provide an update as soon as possible and apologise to customers for any inconvenience and thank them for their patience while we fully restore affected services.”
Update 23/05/2019 07:00am:
We’re advised by Optus this morning that service has been restored. An Optus spokesperson gave us the following comment after technicians worked overnight to restore services:
Some Optus customers may have experienced an issue affecting access to some websites, which has now been fully restored.
Our technical teams identified an issue which saw some international traffic being affected.
Optus apologises to customers who were affected and thanks them for their patience while services were restored at around midnight this morning.
For what it’s worth, my Optus 4G mobile service can now access Netflix and our home automation gear is now working properly whereas last night it wasn’t.
If your service is still not functioning correctly it may be worth restarting your phone or home broadband service to see if that gets it working – it did here.
Update 23/05/2019 4:00pm:
Some customers experienced further outages today, though Optus now assures us that all issues have been resolved and everything should be working normally:
Optus is continuing to test and monitor performance following an overnight issue that affected some customer access to some international internet, streaming and gaming services.
We are pleased to report that access to those platforms and websites remains stable, however, we encourage customers to contact us if they have other issues they require assistance with.
