BigPond hit by nation-wide outage (Australian IT).

“BigPond dialup and ADSL was out from 2.30 this morning until 8.55am after a partial failure in a switch in the core of the network.“

I find this article interesting for two reasons. Firstly because it only states BigPond had an outage, not the whole Telstra ADSL network in Victoria, which includes wholesale customers such as Optus, Comindico, Netspace, etc. Secondly because it says BigPond dialup was also having issues. Bigpond dialup is a retail product of Telstra, and should not (in theory) share any authentication infrastructure with the wholesale ADSL product. I’m not sure if the article is correct on that point since I didn’t check for dial outages at the time of the outage and the Telstra Service Status page is claiming there were no issues with BigPond dialup yesterday. They do report on the ADSL outage though:

Service Disruption Started: Tuesday, 25 May 2004 7:00:00 AM EST
Service Disruption Ended: Tuesday, 25 May 2004 9:45:00 PM EST
Last Updated: Tuesday, 25 May 2004 10:39:59 PM EST
Customer Impact: Some customers in Victoria may be having difficulty logging onto the internet. We are working to fix the problem as quickly as possible and apologise for any inconvenience

My home ADSL was down again from 19:56:27 until 20:03:30, but seems to have been stable since then.