As I write this, the Optus CEO and Managing Director of Networks are getting grilled by clueless Senators up in Canberra that you can wisely ignore, but as part of that process Optus submitted a document to the Senate with an account of what happened on the day. From 4am to 10am they didn't really know what was happening, but by 10:21am realised that "resetting and clearing routing connectivity on network elements which had disconnected themselves from the network" and "physically rebooting and reconnecting some network elements to restore connectivity" appeared to fix things, so that's what they did until everything was up and running at around 2PM. The document confirms that "the outage occurred due to approximately 90 PE routers automatically self-isolating in order to protect themselves from an overload of IP routing information" and was the result of "a software upgrade at one of the Singtel internet exchanges (known as STiX) in North America". There's still ACMA's and the Communications department's investigations too.
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