Telstra suffered a nationwide network outage last night, as two of its internet domain name servers ceased to respond to queries from thousands of customer systems.
Two Telstra name servers used by customers for domain resolution, ns0 and ns1.telstra.net, went offline just after eight o'clock last night, users reported.
Domain name system servers are used to look up and point client systems to the correct IP address for human readable URLs such as www.telstra.net.
Without working DNS resolution, web browsers and other applications are unable to locate the IP address of the server they need to communicate with.
The name servers appear to have come back up around 11pm yesterday.
Telstra's service status web page made no mention of the DNS server problem.
While many Telstra customers took to Twitter and Facebook to complain about the outage, the telco did not confirm the service interruption until this morning, when it said the issue had been dealt with.
@crakd67 Sorry for the delay in replying - the DNS issue has since been resolved - Steph
— Telstra (@Telstra) May 12, 2016
iTnews has contacted Telstra for comment on the outage.
The telco earlier this month pledged to pour an extra $50 million into its mobile network after a series of damaging outages in the early months of this year.
Update A Telstra spokesman acknowledged last night’s outage and attributed it to a failure with a component that manages traffic to its two DNS servers.
"We can confirm there was an issue with one of our DNS servers which impacted some of our corporate customers only. It was resolved in 90 minutes," the spokesperson said.
"We isolated the component and traffic was directed to the servers."
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