Telstra has admitted that a widespread internet outage affecting customers in Brisbane, Sydney, and Melbourne was caused by a domain name server (DNS) issue, not a malicious cyber attack as initially suspected.
The telecommunications company had earlier reported a denial of service (DoS) attack on its servers on Sunday, which it said led to connectivity problems for home internet users across Australia's eastern states. A DoS attack floods a network with traffic to cause a crash, denying access to legitimate users.
However, after investigation, Telstra's security teams determined that the disruption was not malicious. '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,' the company stated.
Telstra assured customers that no personal data had been compromised during the outage and apologised for the inconvenience. 'We're really sorry for getting in the way of your weekend plans,' the company tweeted.
Other internet providers did not report similar connectivity issues, despite a spike in reports of NBN problems before 11am on the day of the outage.
