Tuesday night woes for BigPond broadband users

The provider's mail servers were also experiencing problems, with users all over the nation being able to receive mail but with no mail going out. Telstra corporate affairs manager, Craig Middleton, told ZDNet Australia  this morning that the mail problem affected users in all states did not affect all users as not all mail servers were within the building affected.

Frantic users on broadband information site Whirlpool users were advising each other to under no conditions reboot their connection, because if they did they would soon find they couldn't get back online. The site, which is instrumental to the provision of information about broadband services in Australia, drew the attention of Telstra technicians, who speedily posted information about the disruption.

According to Middleton, ADSL services resumed by 8pm (AEDT), with cable users being able to connect by 9pm (AEDT). Other service interruptions (including the problem with the mail servers) were fixed by 10:30pm (AEDT).

Posts by Whirlpool users suggested that the Bigpond RADIUS server had gone down, affecting all services requiring authentication. This would not normally have been an issue, the posts suggested, however a "lack of fallback service and database backup" caused major delays.