Aussie Broadband to review processes following Vic, Tasmania ...

Aussie Broadband has committed to reviewing its processes following an outage on 27 September that affected its customers in Victoria and Tasmania.

The internet provider announced on social media website X that it was experiencing a network issue in the two states, with the first mention of the outage at 9:48am Australian Eastern Standard Time for Victoria. An update was then provided 13 minutes later to include Tasmania.

However, customers on both X and social media website Reddit claimed they had been affected hours earlier, with some stating their connection was affected from as early as 3am.

Aussie was aware of the lag in informing its customer base as it provided its first apology at 11:01am.

“We apologise for the delay in notifying the outage here on [socials] this morning[;] due to a  [Victoria] public holiday the team weren’t available as early as we would normally be. But, no excuses, we should have been here sooner and for that we do apologise,” the company’s X account wrote.

After 1pm, Aussie’s X account claimed the issue was resolved on its end and issued a second apology.

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

“Your trust and support drive everything we do, and we do not take it lightly. Thank you for your understanding and candid feedback[;] we hope to make it up to you.”

When approached for a statement, Aussie sent ARN the text in the second apology.

Despite claiming the issue was resolved, some customers on social media still claimed their service had not been fixed.

Aussie’s internet outage comes as the Senate committee set up to look into the national Optus network outage that took place in November last year released its report about incident.

The report provided a particular focus on Optus and its “manifestly inadequate” communications, which it claimed were lacking in timeliness and comprehensiveness as the first public interview by then-CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin took place more than six hours after the outage started.

Prior to this point, social media and statements to the media were used as the main means of communication. However, the report saw the former method seen as largely useless as affected customers were unlikely to be able to access social media.

As such, the the committee provided a range of recommendations that would affect all telecommunications carriers during widespread outages. This includes the development of an enforceable communications standard to make communication with the government, emergency services and the public during national outages an obligation.

“This display of poor public communication has highlighted to the committee that there are currently no standard requirements for how carriers are to communicate with stakeholders during a mass service disruption,” the report said. “It seems evident that the internal approaches of telecommunications carriers to public communications may not be reliable.”

Other recommendations included the government to work with carriers to examine large-scale network roaming and mutual assistance arrangements for major outages, the expedition of the development of a tailored dispute resolution mechanism to make sure appropriate compensation for mass telecommunications outages takes place and to review the Consumer Service Guarantee that is applicable to fixed broadband and mobile telecommunications services.