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Telstra sees connection issues with US-hosted websites

Telstra has followed up its nationwide mobile network outage earlier this week with problems connecting to websites hosted by third-party US-based providers.
Written by Corinne Reichert, Contributor

Telstra has seen another issue pop up overnight, with customers experiencing difficulty in connecting to some websites hosted by United States-based providers.

According to the telecommunications company, the issue was not caused by Telstra's own network, but rather by a third-party provider in the US.

"We received reports yesterday from Telstra customers that they were unable to access some websites hosted primarily by Bluehost, Hostgator, JustHost, and HostMonster," a Telstra spokesperson told ZDNet.

"We identified that our customers were being impacted by a router failure with a US-based service provider."

The telco first admitted to the problem in response to a customer across two tweets this morning: "We identified an issue connecting to some US providers yesterday. It was not an issue in our network, but we worked with the providers to find a fix for our customers early this morning."

The issue was repaired overnight, Telstra said.

"The issue was not in our network, but we worked with the US service provider overnight to resolve the issue on their end for our customers," the spokesperson added.

The connection issue follows the nationwide network outage experienced by Telstra on Tuesday, which was caused by "embarrassing human error". The outage took down 2G, 3G, and 4G services across the country for several hours.

As a result, the telco is offering customers free unlimited data this coming Sunday, February 14, to compensate.

"While the outage was short in duration, we fully realise the impact it had on our customers, which is why we are offering all of our customers a day of free mobile data this Sunday," Telstra chief operating officer Kate McKenzie said on Wednesday.

"Customers don't need to do anything to receive the free data; it will happen automatically for all of our mobile customers. I apologise again on behalf of the company, and thank everyone for their patience while we restored services."

McKenzie had revealed on Tuesday afternoon that the outage was caused by an incorrect procedure being followed after one of the telco's 10 nodes was taken down to be repaired.

"Our mobile network is set up with a number of major connection points (what we call nodes) around the country, which our customers connect to. These nodes are the equipment that essentially manage the flow of voice and data traffic across our mobile network. The outage was triggered when one of these nodes experienced a technical fault and was taken offline to fix," McKenzie explained.

"This normally wouldn't impact services, as we have processes in place to make sure any customers currently connected to a node are transferred to another node before it is taken offline. Unfortunately, on this occasion, the right procedures were not followed and this resulted in customers being disconnected and consequent heavy congestion on other nodes as customers attempted to reconnect to the network."

The telco then brought voice services back online, followed by data services.

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