Telstra says it's not to blame for a major outage to OzEmail's service over the weekend - which OzEmail claims to have been caused by Telstra's fibre-optic cable cut.
"We can confirm the outage was due to a Telstra fibre-optic cable being cut. Until that was repaired, customers wouldn't have been able to connect. There was nothing wrong with our systems at all," a spokesperson from OzEmail told ZDNet.
However, Telstra says the cable cut - which occurred in Melbourne over the weekend - should not have had an impact on other ISPs, adding that OzEmail should have sufficient redundancy to back-up the system in such an event.
"Redundancy automatically switches over to the back-up system, sometimes there may be a minor delay. OzEmail should've had sufficient back-up on their system," a Telstra spokesperson said.
OzEmail declined to comment on that.
Telstra claims its BigPond customers weren't affected by the cable cut because the telco had sufficient reserve to manage traffic flows.
"Other ISPs should have sufficient redundancy of the same standard Telstra does. Our report showed there was no impact on Telstra customers as traffic flow went on to another capacity."
What back-up capacity does OzEmail have?" the Telstra spokesperson said.
According to one OzEmail user, he was unable to connect to email for two and a half days.
"Time-outs occurred when trying to connect to the OzEmail site all day [Sunday] and [Monday] morning," a source told ZDNet.
"During this time, users such as myself, were unable to check mail for 2.5 days," the source said.
However, OzEmail told ZDNet the outage only occurred between 3pm Saturday afternoon and 3am Sunday morning.
The client also reported that he experienced 'time outs' when dialling in through Big Pond's service.
Telstra says most of the cable was repaired Sunday morning, however it was not back to full service until Monday morning.
