What was initially thought to be a “malicious” cyber attack on Telstra, creating connectivity issues for some home internet users, turned out to be a domain name server issue, the company has admitted.
Telstra reported a denial of service attack on its servers on Sunday which it said led to widespread internet outages in Australia’s eastern states.
A denial of service attack floods a network with traffic or information to trigger a crash, denying legitimate users access.
Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane were the main outage hotspots.
Other internet providers did not report connectivity issues despite reports of NBN problems spiking before 11am.
Telstra said it was confident it had blocked all “malicious traffic” and was working on getting users back online.
The telecommunications giant insisted customers’ personal data hadn’t been compromised and apologised for the outage.
“Your info isn’t at risk,” the company tweeted on Sunday.
But Telstra subsequently stated: “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.”
“We’re really sorry for getting in the way of your weekend plans,” Telstra tweeted.
This story was updated on Tuesday 4 August with Telstra’s announcement that the outage was was actually a domain name server issue.