Optical fibre break behind big outage

A major Optus outage has disrupted 14,000+ services in Frankston and the Mornington Peninsula today, underscoring critical vulnerabilities in Australia’s telecom infrastructure.

Associate Professor Bill Corcoran of Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering explained that the failure was caused by a cut to an aerial optical-fibre connection.

Highlighting how heavily our growing data demands depend on physical fibre networks, he said "A lot of our fibres are in the ground but sometimes it's more convenient and more useful to put the cables along those powerlines you see in the street."

While modern systems are typically designed with redundancy - allowing traffic to reroute when a line is damaged - Associate Professor Corcoran noted that in this case, that backup path appears to have been missing, creating a single point of failure.

Read the full article Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) news article here.