Optus Outage Leaves Millions of Australians Without Mobile and Internet Services (abc.net.au) 59
Long-time Slashdot reader RobHart writes: During the night, the entire Optus mobile network went down and remains down. This is the second largest mobile network in Australia and it is the first time a network has gone down nationwide. It is affecting the trains in Melbourne and any business across Australia that uses the Optus service for phones or data. "Optus is aware of an issue that may be impacting some of our mobile and internet customers," the company wrote in a statement. "We are currently working to identify the cause and apologize for any inconvenience. In case of an emergency customers can still call triple zero."
Authorities are checking whether the outage is the result of a cyberattack, although they don't believe it is.
Authorities are checking whether the outage is the result of a cyberattack, although they don't believe it is.
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Yet our politicians in Canberra still want to suck Washington DC dick despite what you Yanks really think of us, go figure.
Don't feel too bad. Most of us Yanks feel the same way about ourselves. ALL of us feel that way about Washington DC.
Re: I'd love to see them simply stay offline (Score:1)
The fact that people like you get to vote makes me realize that democracy is a failed experiment.
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Naw, there will always be a small minority of pissed off, small minded, angry jerks like him around. Usually they are few enough in numbers that they can rant at the street corners without any harm.
They only cause problems when their numbers reach dangerous proportions, like Texas or Florida. The solution there is for sane people to move away so those states lose many of their congressional representatives and they are redistributed to saner states.
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Naw, there will always be a small minority of pissed off, small minded, angry jerks like him around. Usually they are few enough in numbers that they can rant at the street corners without any harm.
They only cause problems when their numbers reach dangerous proportions, like Texas or Florida. The solution there is for sane people to move away so those states lose many of their congressional representatives and they are redistributed to saner states.
The only problem with the information age and easy access to information is that the ranting loons on the street corners of thousands of cities can now congregate online, stir their lunacy together into a semi-coherent ramble that can be consistent across a continent or even around the world, and if the easily impressionable start hearing the same lunacy spouted from every street corner, it suddenly starts to sound extremely appealing to them. And then they go to research it, find still more people spouting
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PLEASE dump some bad karma on me for trolling
This is new. A completely self aware troll. We applaud you for your recognition of the problem.
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Amaysim (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep... my middle son had his very last ever high school exam this morning, before he graduates, (physics).
Comes into our room just before 6AM saying his sim is broken and wanting a paperclip to reseat it. Took about 5 minutes to work out it was Optus.
THIS dependency on always on internet creates lots of problems for a cashless society. If war or disaster (or you get 'de customered by the banking system for your social media posts or political affiliation) hits, we're screwed!
Re:Amaysim (Score:5, Informative)
dependency on always on internet creates lots of problems for a cashless society.
FYI, cashless payments including apple/google/paywave do NOT require "always on". Phones need only occasional connection, and payment terminals will work without validation.
It is up to the vendor whether to accept the risk of fraud. They may set a lower limit, or require ID for larger transactions.
We got by for decades using credit cards without live validation.
Credit cards work offline! (Score:2)
My nearby bakery had an Internet outage a couple of months ago, after a large snowstorm. It didn't phase them at all, they simply wrote down the credit card numbers on pieces of paper that customers signed.
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Well not so secret secret is that in most countries the financial institutions allow for automatic approvals of cash transactions under a certain amount via the bank terminals in the stores when the network is unavailable.
Example: In Australia at some stores an automatic $100 approval is granted for transactions under that limit. The actual transactions is cached and completed at a later time if the network is unavailable. Now this doesn't work in all shops. As each bank sets it's criteria on how a sho
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Yes,
It is up to the bank that issues the terminal whether it will be supported for a merchant. The merchant can also so no. As the merchant is liable for any fraud of the system.
Some banks around the world even have this built into their phone apps that take payments.
This is exactly how pay terminals in planes work. They aren't on the network. Only very recently have planes got a reasonably reliable internet service. But those terminals only sync once they are back on the ground. ( For the most part. I
some gamed that for an long time with an bus (Score:2)
some gamed that for an long time with an bus board the bus in an data dead zone with an account with no funds left on if get to ride for free as the system can't check that you have no funds left on your bus card.
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I very much doubt that is an option in Australia. Any time I have been in any kind of retail outlet, if the card readers comms is out, it's cash or nothing. POS systems won't allow it either
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Well, they were semi-online. Small transactions would be done via the imprinting machine, but larger transactions would often require pre-approval.
That didn't require you to leave the store - it just meant the cashier would have to make a phone call to their credit card processor to pre-a
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It might come as a shock to many people, but credit cards can work offline! Heck, originally they were almost always used offline. Vendors simply used imprinting machines to create impressions of cards on carbon copy paper..
We used those imprinting machines back in the early 90's but we authenticated every transaction by phone. I forgot to authenticate a $5K purchase once and almost lost my job.
Incidentally, I chatted about this with a clerk at Harbor Freight a few weeks ago. She reached under the counter and pulled out her card imprinter. They still do it by hand when things go down, and they still call it in.
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A lack of electricity means shopping centres don't have lighting, air-con, lifts/escalators, PoS/EFTPoS terminals. When it was price-stickers and a department-code cash-register, a flash-light and a hand-held calculator allowed the shop to continue selling.
When always-on fails, I can't start any games, they need today's adverts or a license-check to start. I can't do many tasks (eg. read the news/emails) because the data (and sometimes Software-as-a-service) is on a server/cloud.
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THIS dependency on always on internet creates lots of problems for a cashless society.
Does it? I mean Optus was down for most of the day? *looks left* *looks right*. It seems society endured. The world and society is far more resilient against such a "calamity" than you give it credit for.
This isn't the first nation wide mobile outage (other providers have had it). This isn't the first payment processor outage (has happened many times). The only thing they all share in common is that we are all still here the day after, and the world didn't descend into a mad-max style dystopia.
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Singapore had it when a chiller failed and caused several datacenters to overheat causing payment systems to go down. Of course, they are practically a cashless society (and heavily monitored by government, at that).
Of course, I suppose a little hubris applies because disasters rare
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Yep... my middle son had his very last ever high school exam this morning, before he graduates, (physics). Comes into our room just before 6AM saying his sim is broken and wanting a paperclip to reseat it. Took about 5 minutes to work out it was Optus.
THIS dependency on always on internet creates lots of problems for a cashless society. If war or disaster (or you get 'de customered by the banking system for your social media posts or political affiliation) hits, we're screwed!
You're talking localized events. Think bigger. All we need is a good solar storm, like the one we've found evidence for that happened about 14 thousand years ago or a little more, and any non-shielded electronics are buh-bye. Imagine the globe being wiped clean of modern electronics in a few seconds. It'd be mildly amusing for about two to three hours, but it would put an absolute halt to our current trajectory.
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Why would Australia have better pings with Voyager 1 and 2 than NASA?
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Why would Australia have better pings with Voyager 1 and 2 than NASA?
The Voyager craft are heading South, at 48 degrees to the ecliptic, so they are closer to Australia, and communicate with NASA via Canberra dish DSS34.
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Any ideas as to what sort of "non-cyberattack" incident could cause the whole thing to go down at once?
Re:It is Australia (Score:5, Funny)
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:-) Love it!
But fortunately, we are still alive and most of us have mobile and data connections. Optus is only the 2nd largest carrier in Oz - so the rest of us are OK.
Mind you, our Internet does suck - thanks to a past Liberal government completely stuffing up the proposed Fibre to the Premises roll out. They promised 'their' version would be better, cheaper and faster.
Of course, it is none of those things...
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> thanks to a past Liberal government
For readers outside of Oz, Liberal party is the name of the main conservative party here. Not confusing at all.
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Not confusing at all.
One of the founders, didn't want his not-so-progressive politics to be confused with definitely-not-progressive politics: He wanted everyone to know he was more 'liberal' than right-wing fundamentalism.
Re: It is Australia (Score:1)
Thereâ(TM)s the famous anecdote of a conservative politician being introduced in Washington as a staunch anti republican liberal and at least some folk assuming he was a borderline communist.
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Our local guy may have murdered a couple of them.
Re: It is Australia (Score:2)
Incompetence ?
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As someone who works a lot at the Enterprise level the answer is a lot of things could have taken everything down at once.
There is a lot of interconnected dependencies with any large Telco provider. Telcos are a lot more than just "networks". There are lots of layers of capabilities that MUST be operating for the whole to keep working. Examples:
Internal DNS,
Corporate PKI infra,
Base BGP routing.
Identity management systems.
Basically all of the above are trust systems. Building layers in different areas.
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Just a guess.
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I am surprised anyone even noticed a difference.
No upside-down pics on the image boards today.
This is a good thing in disguise (Score:2)
This lets people figure out how dependent they are on their smart phones and eftpos cards.
I always tell people to keep enough cash on them for at least a day or two's expected expenses, a bit more if you want to plan for the unexpected.
Usually the response is along the lines of "but eftpos will never go down".. then things like this happen and they can't buy lunch.
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Australia really has become a cashless society - I have zero cash in my wallet right now and haven't had any in it for months. Needless to say I will correct that now.
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How about making sure you actually carry a credit card as well. Moving all your cards to phone apps and then never carrying a card strikes me as very dumb.
Oh my phone died and now you can't get home or eat. I've heard this way to many times from young people. The drama could be all avoided by simply carrying 1 card at all times.
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The Optus information leak was worse than it should have been, because the company kept more information on their customers than what was really needed.
The Australian governments response was to try to shore up telco security, rather than ensure that more information than necessary for billing is not collected.
The government wants telcos to collect as much data as possible on people for their own use when required. The metadata logging laws and the "assistance and access act 2018" mean they can be forced to
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This lets people figure out how dependent they are on their smart phones and eftpos cards.
People learned a big lesson today. They learned that they are still alive and okay at the end of the day and that an outage of smartphones and EFTPOS cards didn't actually mean the end of days despite their complete dependence and endless declarations of the end-of-days coming from folks like you on the internet.
That is the only lesson anyone learnt. If you think that any single people will change as a result of this insanely rare minor inconvenience then you don't actually seem to understand people at all.
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endless declarations of the end-of-days coming from folks like you on the internet.
Please cite where I said this would be a world apocalypse event.
If you think that any single people will change as a result of this insanely rare minor inconvenience then you don't actually seem to understand people at all
There was already someone elsewhere in this thread that said this reminded them that they should probably keep some cash on them just in case. So there's your one. It's not an earth shattering habit to keep cash on you so I'm not sure why you think it's such a hindrance.
The world moves on, and no one cares as society moves ever more cashless.
I'd disagree that no-one cares. They won't care until it affects them or they're put in a bad situation that they learn from, like teenagers only taking their phones to pay for
Yup, download google maps for your area (Score:2)
Working as a courier with no data or phone access was ... problematic. Going to populate that spare sim slot with another carriers sim, if I ain't moving, I ain't getting no moola.
Many eggs, very few baskets (Score:2)
We see a lot of that lately. Just imagine a major cloud goes offline (Azure came close just this year...). Instant chaos.
Overall, we need more and smaller operators or things will go to hell.
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Just imagine a major cloud goes offline (Azure came close just this year...). Instant chaos.
Major clouds have gone offline. No not instant chaos. In fact it was much like the mobile outage today: minor inconvenience that people will ultimately soon forget.
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As usual, you are bereft of insight and just make up nonsense. No major cloud provider has ever gone offline in a majority of serviced regions for any longer time.
Change Control and Production Testing SLA's (Score:2)