Swiftel, was today unable to provide precise information regarding the duration of the outage pending a detailed engineering report but some customers reported being without service for over 12 hours.
Swiftel is yet to complete its investigation of the incident but the service provider's senior engineer has given indications it may have been linked to a planned ADSL outage carried out by Telstra in the Melbourne area just prior to the outage Monday.
Senior Swiftel network engineer, Steve Waddington, said a bug in the telecommunications company's RADIUS authentication server caused it to stop feeding login data to its customer-facing hardware.
Waddington said the bug appears to have been triggered by an unusually high volume of service requests.
"There was a general outage in Melbourne where all of our users were dropped for a minute and came back online, which seemed to be a trigger for it -- but it could be incidental," said Waddington.
Waddington suspects that the bug lay in the RADIUS server's traffic accounting module. Swiftel engineers are currently returning the server to operation in a controlled manner that will allow them to identify the glitch.
While the company has wasted no time identifying the problem, a handful of customers have accused the service provider's technical support service of dropping the ball.
One customer who contacted ZDNet Australia; claimed the ISP failed to provide sufficient information indicating that service had been restored, causing him to stay offline longer than necessary.
"We received no notification that it was back up but tried to reboot our master router ourselves. It did work to restore service, but we got no help or info from Swiftel," said the customer who asked to remain anonymous.
Swiftel ADSL service manager, John Linton, has rejected the claim pointing out that the company took every step within reason to keep its customers informed about the outage via both its Web site and SMS-based notification service.
"With thousands of customers someone will always have an issue and all anyone can do is do the best for their customers. That won't suit everyone all of the time," said Linton.
According to Linton, Swiftel's final message to customers concerning the outage read: "Resolution has now been reached. If your service does not restore, reboot your modem".
"Can an ISP do more than send what are expensive SMSes throughout an outage that is particularly long and particularly difficult to fix?" asked Linton.
The customer, who signed up for the SMS notification service indicated that of three messages he received during the outage none were similar to the one described by Linton.
"They were good with the SMSes. But they didn't tell me when I was back up, or that I had to reboot my router, so I was down for much longer than I needed to be," he said.
Regardless, the need to reboot modems in the wake of outages, explained Linton, should be common knowledge among experienced ADSL users.
I was affected by the outage, and all I can say is considering the circumstances, Swiftel did more than anyone could expect.
Throughout the day I recieved 7 SMS messages, on the hour, letting me know the problem was ongoing. After a few hours, I reset my modem again, and the service was back online. No problems!