Primus customers in the dark over outage

Customers hosted at Primus Telecom's Melbourne datacentre experienced outages this morning, with several sites forced offline.

(Do not unplug me image by Chris Chan, CC BY 2.0)

Among those confirmed to be affected were security software vendor AVG and Mirvac's chain of sites, including Mirvac Hotels.

These sites were not responding, or were experiencing intermittent delays, from 9.45am AEDST this morning. The outage has resulted in several other sites on the same hosting service being taken offline, but Primus has not indicated the scale of the outage, or how many were affected.

Initial customer reports indicated that the problem was caused by a routing issue with Primus' upstream providers, but the company later clarified that some of its core switches were having issues. Most outages were resolved almost immediately, and all issues were resolved by 11.35am, the company said.

Primus' own site was hosted on the same hosting services, resulting in it falling offline for the duration of the outage. In addition, users were unable to access the company's system-status page. This service now appears to be hosted in its Sydney datacentre, although it does not contain any indication that a fault occurred.

The company has also not posted any public details of the outage on its website or social-media accounts, and affected customers do not appear to have been contacted.