The full scope of the outage, which was originally reported by ZDNet Australia as affecting iiNet customers, was made clear today as Telstra confirmed that a power supply failure at its Pitt St. premises resulted in downtime for BigPond ADSL and cable customers.
Telstra received over 8,000 calls to its helpdesk during the outage.
A Telstra spokeswoman told ZDNet Australia that a backup power supply that was supposed to kick in failed. It is still investigating why the failure occurred.
The power was restored at around 7pm, about an hour after the network went down, according to the spokeswoman. However service wasn't fully restored until about midnight because everyone was trying to get back on the network at once.
This caused congestion to the authentication servers as a "bank up of people trying to get back onto the network" clogged the system.
ADSL customers receive a rebate on their bill if the total downtime for the month of June reaches 1 percent.
"Those ADSL customers are eligible for a service level guarantee... a credit will automatically be applied [to their accounts]," the spokeswoman said.
"In terms of cable customers, we are gearing up to offer a cable service level guarantee to compliment the existing ADSL service level guarantee," she said.
This guarantee will be introduced "in the next few months" and is being brought in to assure cable customers the telco will seek to minimise outages in the future.
Telstra are keen to point out that recent network performance has been quite good, and they aren't happy about the latest outage.
"We're very disappointed by this glitch... this year the ADSL network has been performing well," she said.
It's about bloody time.