The fault was detected at around 7:30am and Telstra's help desk initially advised users that service would be restored by 10:00am. Service was eventually restored at noon.
A spokesperson from the company's public relations team said the culprit was a faulty router, which disrupted BigPond's "session manager" application. While users already logged on to the network retained access, any new logins were rejected. An error message and a suggestion to call the company's help desk was the only remedy offered.
Telstra conceded that the incident overloaded BigPond's helpdesk, which failed to connect users reliably for much of the outage. The company logged 3477 calls during the period and said that 2790 were terminated after callers received an automated voice update, with the spokesperson commenting that these numbers represent a low response.
ZDNet Australia's own attempts to secure further updates after the initial 10:00am deadline call this into question, however. Constant calls to the BigPond help desk resulted in constant -dumping" of our calls, with a busy signal the only reward for navigating through Telstra's menus.
Telstra's spokesperson said the company apologised for the incident and was working to ensure outages of this type did not occur in future. -Telstra is working towards avoiding this as much as possible."
This mess actually started yesterday, the POS kept on dropping out, then died totally around midnight, then sort of came back this morning, until it died totally about 7am
tel$tra at its best, expect nothing, never be disappointed