Exetel internet outage brings down website, phone support
A two-hour core network outage at Exetel this morning also brought down the company's website and its Voice-over-IP (VoIP) telephone support system, leaving customers to turn to social media for answers.
The outage started around 7.20am AEST this morning, with customers reporting on broadband forum Whirlpool that they were unable to connect to their ADSL service, or were having difficulty with Exetel's DNS.
The outage also brought down Exetel's website, and Exetel's support line, which uses VoIP, was disconnected during the outage, meaning that customers had no way to reach Exetel to report the problem.
"For a business that has an online business model, being offline over a hour and uncontactable by telephone (both option one: sales; and two: tech support go nowhere) is not ideal," one Whirlpool user said.
No Exetel representative posted on Whirlpool during the outage to explain what was going on.
"They really should know that we are all sitting on Whirlpool awaiting word, since every other mode of contact is dead. It's bad business practice to keep the customers in the dark until an issue is resolved," another user said.
When services came back on at 9.25am, Exetel posted a short explanation on its website.
"We had a service disruption on our core network from 7.20am to 9.25am. All services should be restored by now. All services were down during this time," the company said.
The outage comes just a day before Exetel has planned core network maintenance.
Exetel was still unreachable by phone at the time of writing.