Telstra hit by nationwide data outage

update Telstra has suffered a nationwide data outage this afternoon, which the telco has blamed on the brief failure of its international cable link.

Telstra's data service began to suffer at 1.40pm AEDST this afternoon, when the company's international link stopped processing service requests. The telco then noticed performance issues in local sites as the network began to sag under the sheer load of requests, before crashing shortly after that.

The telco has told ZDNet Australia that the outage affected both its fixed-broadband and mobile-data customers nationwide for roughly half an hour.

Telstra gradually started restoring services at 2.25pm AEDST.

The company has advised that its front-of-house technical support staff across fixed and mobile products were experiencing an extremely high volume of calls for help.

Telstra wholesale customer Dodo later said that one of its routers had been at the centre of the outage.

"Dodo experienced a hardware issue with a Cisco border router. This issue caused Dodo to broadcast network routes to Telstra," the company said.

"In normal circumstances, this would not result in a network outage. However, it appears that these routes were accepted by Telstra and propagated to Telstra's downstream customers rather than Telstra simply filtering the routes. This caused major issues for Telstra and its customers which should have been avoided."

Updated at 9.46pm, 23 February 2012: added comment from Dodo.