Optus suffers major outage

Customers have been left unable to make or receive calls for several hours.

The Google logo in Brussels. Picture: AFP

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 1.50pm: Optus suffers major outage

A mobile phone outage has wreaked havoc on Optus customers just 10 days before Christmas.

Users took to social media on Tuesday morning to complain they hadn’t been able to make or receive calls.

The telecommunications company confirmed a fault had impacted 4G-based calls on some handsets.

“We’re working to restore services as soon as possible,” it wrote on Twitter.

“In the meantime, we recommend switching to the 3G network or enabling WiFi Calling on your device if possible.”

An Optus spokeswoman said the issue had since been resolved and all services were back up and running.

“We apologise for any inconvenience and thank customers for their patience,” she said.

NCA Newswire

8.00am: EU could ban Facebook, Google

Draft EU rules to be unveiled today would see tech giants face huge fines or even banned from the market for breaches, sources said, posing a major challenge to the likes of Google and Facebook.

The EU Commission is gearing up to present its long-trailed Digital Services Act and its accompanying Digital Markets Act to lay out strict conditions for internet giants to do business in the 27 countries.

Picture: AFP

EU sources told AFP on Monday the landmark legislation would see tech behemoths facing fines of up to 10 per cent of their revenues for breaking some of the most serious competition rules.

It could also see some of the world’s biggest firms banned from the EU market “in the event of serious and repeated breaches of law which endanger the security of European citizens”, the sources said.

The proposals — which could revolutionise how Big Tech does business — aim to tackle hate speech and disinformation online and curb the might of leading firms to dominate markets.

The largest companies would be designated as internet “gatekeepers” under the legislation, subject to specific regulations to limit their power over the market.

Some ten firms — including Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft — will be slapped with the designation.

The draft laws will go through a long and complex ratification process, with the EU’s member states, the European parliament, and company lobbyists and trade associations influencing the final law.

AFP

6.25am: Google suffers widespread outage

More than a dozen Google services, including Gmail and YouTube, were offline in swathes of the globe, interrupting access for individuals and businesses.

The Alphabet-owned company’s services showed errors for users attempting to sign in or access their emails or files, according to social-media postings from users. On YouTube, the home page was replaced with an illustration of a monkey with a hammer, with the title, “oops.”

Picture: AFP

On Google, searches for “Is Google down?” rocketed in popularity.

A Google dashboard showing the availability of Google services indicated that in addition to email and storage, apps including its calendar, videoconferencing tools, document-editing service and spreadsheets were offline as of about 11pm (AEDT). Service for the affected apps began to resume around 40 minutes later.

Google said the outage hit its authentication system and was the result of an “internal storage quota issue,” adding that the problem was resolved and services restored within about 45 minutes.

The outage hit at tens of millions of people who have had to stay home on and off for the better part of a year because of the coronavirus pandemic. Remote work and learning have left businesses and individuals more dependent than ever on online services, for which Google is a widely used provider.

Google’s Gmail is one of the most popular email clients globally, and the company’s Workspace office tools, formerly known as G Suite and a competitor to Microsoft Corp.’s Office, are popular among businesses and institutions.

“Why g suite why? Why would you crash on a freakin Monday!! Oh wait #2020,” wrote one Twitter user.

Temporary interruptions to the availability of popular online services are relatively common occurrences, though their impact has increased as more businesses outsource their digital infrastructure and tools to outside businesses, often large internet companies. A decade ago, a Twitter Inc. outage — accompanied by an error image dubbed the “fail whale” — might have boosted office productivity. Today, outages can slow some companies to a crawl.

In November, Amazon.com Inc. grappled with an hours long outage tied to its enormous cloud-computing operation that affected operations of many of its clients, such as videostreaming device company Roku Inc. In July, apps such as Spotify and Tinder experienced outages for several hours because of what Facebook Inc. said was a bug in its software for iPhone users.

In March 2019, some Google services including Gmail were slowed or inaccessible because of what the company called a “cascading failure” that began after its engineers made tweaks to an internal storage service. The same week, services from Apple Inc. and Facebook also suffered outages.

Dow Jones newswire