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Cable outage may hamper Net traffic

A clarification was made to this story. Read below for details.
Written by Renai LeMay, Contributor
A clarification was made to this story. Read below for details.
A major Internet link between Australia and the United States is suffering an outage, potentially causing slow international speeds for local customers.

Internet service providers iiNet and Internode today notified their customers of the outage, which iiNet said had occurred on a cable operated by carrier Southern Cross.

"Fault cause is believed to be a cable cut in the United States between San Jose and Morro Bay," an early advisory from Internode stated. "No estimated time of resolution has been provided and we continue to monitor the situation and liaise with our upstream carriers.

A later advisory from Internode stated the problem was in fact due to a fibre failure close to San Jose.

"We're working with our providers now to resolve this," wrote a representative from iiNet on the forums of broadband site Whirlpool.

"This will be affecting our international capacity," the representative continued.

Another iiNet employee noted the problem was likely to affect a large number of Internet service providers. "It's an issue on the Southern Cross cable," wrote a third member of iiNet's team.

However Internode claimed no impact to customers would result. "There is no service impact to customers," the company noted in its fault notice. iiNet's fault notice is here.

 
Clarification: This story initially reported that a cable between the United States and Australia had been cut, based on advisories from Australian ISPs. It has been updated following advice from the cable owner that circuit problems were in fact the cause of service difficulties.
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