‘Unplanned’: TPG suffers nationwide outage, infuriating customers

One of Australia’s biggest internet providers has crashed nationwide, bringing down support websites and phone hotlines, and infuriating customers.

• Grammys star parties in $10K tracksuit
• Inside Facebook’s privacy nightmare

One of Australia’s biggest internet providers says it has reconnected customers across the country after a catastrophic technical issue brought down internet and phone connections, as well as their support websites and phone hotlines.

TPG confirmed the technical failure on social media late today, following hundreds of complaints about from customers about phone and internet outages shortly after midday AEDT.

More than 11,600 TPG users had rushed to DownDetector to report problems by 1.30pm, with the outages appearing to affect users in every state from Tasmania to Western Australia.

But a TPG representative rejected claims its network had suffered problems, telling News Corp that a server issue had disconnected its users.

“There was no issue on TPG’s network, however TPG experienced a (Domain Name System) server issue which affected customers’ phone and internet services. The issue has now been resolved,” the spokesperson said.

TPG earlier confirmed the company suffered an “unplanned outage” that affected “all of our customers,” and services were being progressively restored.

“We apologise for the inconvenience and will provide further updates as they become available,” the company said in a statement.

The outage affected TPG customers using NBN, ADSL and TPG fibre-to-the-basement connections, as well as landline phones.

Tens of TPG users on Twitter vented their frustration in the last message company representatives sent before the outage, asking why TPG didn’t warn them about the outage and failed to confirm it for hours.

“Not a good way to treat customers,” one complained.

Others took matters into their own hands, advising others to change their router settings to bypass TPG’s DNS server and access Google’s public DNS server instead.

The outage was compounded by the failure of TPG’s support hotline, which played a message stating it was “not in service,” and a “bad gateway” error message displayed where its support website should be.

Originally published as ‘Unplanned’: TPG suffers nationwide outage, infuriating customers