Aussie Broadband outage impacts Victorians on public holiday

An internet outage is currently affecting Aussie Broadband customers in Victoria, in the middle of the state’s public holiday before the AFL grand final.

Outage reports on Downdetector spiked at approximately 8:00 AM this morning, indicating that thousands are without service. Aussie Broadband posted to social media acknowledging the outage and confirmed that some Tasmanian users were also impacted.

At the time of writing, more than 150 locations are affected, according to the telco’s outage page. Aussie Broadband’s budget internet brand, Buddy Telco, also lists various unscheduled outages on its website.

It appears that only NBN and Opticomm customers are affected; its mobile products use the Optus network, which is currently active. There’s no estimated recovery time as of yet.

GadgetGuy understands that the outage is related to Aussie Broadband’s CGNAT infrastructure, a technology used to assign IP addresses. Victoria and Tasmania’s infrastructure is connected, hence the impact on both states.

Aussie Broadband outage updates 1:03 PM: Connections should now be back online

In a statement to GadgetGuy, Aussie Broadband says connections for customers in Victoria and Tasmania should now be back online.

“We have pushed a fix for the issue which caused services in VIC and TAS to drop, and connections should now be back online. If you continue to face problems with your service, you can try to power cycle your device.”

For anyone still encountering connectivity issues, Aussie directed customers to contact its support team. The telco expects wait times to be longer than usual while it works through the influx of support requests.

Aussie Broadband also issued an apology to customers for the outage:

“We want to take this opportunity to deeply apologise once again for the inconvenience and the confusion during today’s outage. There are a lot of learnings from today, and we will be reviewing our processes to make sure we are living up to the promises and expectations of our customers.”

12:35 PM: Potential cause identified

Aussie’s latest update teases some potentially good news. It has started working on “a few possible fixes” after identifying a potential cause.

The telco claims a resolution is “too early to call” and still doesn’t have an estimated timeline. Expect another update in the next half-an-hour.

12:30 PM: Victorians are doing it tough

Condolences to this commenter in the r/Australia Subreddit, who may not necessarily represent all Victorians impacted by the Aussie Broadband outage.

Tried to have a sleep in on the public holiday. Kids were all up in my jam about you tube (sic) not working. Can’t believe I have to engage and actually parent them.”

12:00 PM: No estimated recovery time yet

The telco’s latest update mentions that a “few potential fixes” are in the works but there’s no ETA yet.

Per Aussie’s social media accounts:

“The whole Aussie team is working to resolve this as soon as we can. We know how frustrating this issue is and we are very sorry for the inconvenience.”

Another update is expected by 12:30 PM AEST.

11:30 AM: Issue is “more complex” than expected

In one of the most recent social media posts shared after 11:30 AM, Aussie Broadband labelled the issue as “more complex than we initially anticipated”.

“We are investigating other ways of getting you all back online as soon as we can, but unfortunately we do not have an estimate of when that will be at this time.”

Based in Victoria, Aussie Broadband’s response to the outage is likely delayed due to the state holiday. The local telco acknowledged as such in one of its updates.

We’ll update you with the latest on the Aussie Broadband outage when we learn more. GadgetGuy has contacted Aussie Broadband for comment.

Read more internet telco news on GadgetGuy