Internet outage: Telstra and NBN go down

Home internet and NBN services across the east coast of Australia went down on Sunday, leaving thousands of furious Telstra users offline.

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The mass internet outage affecting thousands of Australians on Sunday was not a cyber attack, according to Telstra.

The telco has backtracked after tweeting on Sunday morning a “malicious” cyber attack was creating connectivity issues, confirming the outage was caused by an issue with a DNS server.

Telstra issued another statement via Twitter telling customers their connection had been fixed before revealing the true cause of the outage just before 2:30pm.

Computer users were badly impacted on Sunday by an internet outage.

“The massive messaging storm that presented as a Denial of Service cyber-attack has been investigated by our security teams and we now believe that it was not malicious, but a Domain Name Server issue,” Tesltra said.

“We’re really sorry for getting in the way of your weekend plans.”

It comes as customers across NSW, Victoria and Tasmania reported internet outages as a result of the server issue, according to a Telstra spokesman.

“We’ll keep you posted as we get on top of it. Sorry to mess with your Sunday plans,” the company said.

Minutes later Telstra confirmed it had “identified the issue” as a malicious cyber attack and was “working on it”.

“Some of our Domain Name Servers (DNS) used to route your traffic online are experiencing a cyber attack, known as a Denial of Service (DoS),” Telstra said.

There have been a number of recent incidents of cyber-warfare in Australia.

“Your info isn’t at risk. We’re doing all we can to get you back online.”

The company said it was “blocking the malicious traffic” attacking some of its services.

“We are confident we have blocked all of this malicious traffic and are working to get you back up and running again,” the company said.

“Thanks for sticking with us.”

It follows a massive cyber-attack on Australia’s political parties and government organisations in June, which were largely blamed on China.