Optus Australia – Massive Network Failure
Here is a quote from a ABC reporter today, who spoke with the Chief Engineer at Engineers Australia.
Engineers Australia says the Optus outage has exposed vulnerabilities in Australia’s telecommunications networks.
Jane MacMaster, who is the Chief Engineer at Engineers Australia, says outages like this create a domino effect on our digital systems and economy.
“I think society is heading in a direction where we’re very reliant on modern technology and part of the challenge is that technology is becoming increasingly complex and increasingly connected,” she says.
“So if there’s a problem in one part of all our systems it’s very easily felt in other parts because the connections are there.”
Today’s outage disrupted everything from trains to hospitals, bank call centres, information lines, and the ability of millions of consumers to access services.
The reason that I felt it was critical information was the last comment. This type of event, prevented people from paying for goods for the best part of half a day. Since we may never get told what the actual fault was triggered by, it goes without saying that:
- Digital IDs are very bad idea
- Digital currency is a very bad idea
In the end, it doesn’t matter whether the cause was programming error, cyber attack, or hardware failure. We just cannot rely on “computer systems” to safely and reliably store data that represents your total wealth (digital currency), or to store data about who you are (digital identification).
From a technical standpoint, I can assure you that the total system has multiple millions of lines of code, perhaps even trillions, in configuration databases, network routers, etc. The chance of something going very wrong is so high, you can bank on it happening again very soon.
Add to this the possibility that it was something like the fault experienced by network giants like Twitter, Facebook and Whatsapp in the past when they had issues with routers responsible for network Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) announcement to the rest of the Internet. This resulted in significant lengthy network disruptions.