Optus fibre cable cut in ACT

Optus cable customers in south-western New South Wales and northern Victoria were hit with congestion yesterday after a fibre cable near Mitchell in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) was cut.

The fibre break occurred at around 3pm yesterday, which ZDNet Australia understands was due to road works in the area. Although Optus has redundancy in place, the company believes that the cut caused congestion issues for Optus cable customers, in particular those on 100Mbps (megabits per second) plans.

Users on broadband-enthusiast website Whirlpool noted issues with accessing a number of sites during the downtime.

"I thought I was going nuts thinking our wireless modem is stuffed up again, but thanks to [Whirlpool] for the heads up here, as I can't access the Optus site either to check," one user in West Melbourne posted.

At 6.47pm AEDST, Optus acknowledged the problem and said it had engineers on the case.

"Please note that we are currently experiencing technical difficulties with Optusnet internet that may prevent you from accessing web pages. Our engineers are aware of the problem, and are endeavouring to resolve it as quickly as possible."

Optus confirmed that the engineers replaced the cut cable, and had restored services by 2am AEDST today.