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Extreme Heat Knocks Out Internet In Australia

Posted by Soulskill on from the some-really-don't-like-it-hot dept.

An anonymous reader writes with news that bad weather caused internet connectivity problems for users in Perth, Western Australia on Monday. But it wasn't raging storms or lightning that caused this outage — it was extreme heat. Monday was the 6th hottest day on record for Perth, peaking around 44.4 C (111.9 F). Thousands of iiNet customers across Australia found themselves offline for about six and a half hours after the company shut down some of its systems at its Perth data center at about 4.30pm AEDST because of record breaking-temperatures. ... "[W]e shut down our servers as a precautionary measure," an iiNet spokesman said late Monday night. "Although redundancy plans ensured over 98 per cent of customers remained unaffected, some customers experienced issues reconnecting to the internet." ... Users in Western Australia, NSW, Victoria and South Australia took to Twitter, Facebook and broadband forum Whirlpool to post their frustrations to the country's second largest DSL internet service provider.

5 of 103 comments (clear)

  1. One ISP is not 'the internet' by pipedwho · · Score: 4, Informative

    Yes, many people were affected, but iiNet is not 'the internet'. All the other big providers were still running just fine.

    You could post the same headline every time someone's modem cable gets knocked out or their router crashes.

  2. Re:(in)Tolerance by talis9 · · Score: 5, Informative

    they had multiple failures. The primary air con failed, and so did the backups

    http://blog.iinet.net.au/statement-chief-technology-officer-mark-dioguardi/

  3. Statement from CTO of iiNet by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    http://blog.iinet.net.au/statement-chief-technology-officer-mark-dioguardi/

    Basically both main and backup aircon went down.

  4. Re:(in)Tolerance by itzly · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Yes, it's unbelievable that something, somewhere goes wrong.

  5. Click bait...Nothing to see...Move along people by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Sigh... first world problems. Few services were shutdown for precaution as result of A/C failure (primary/backup).

    Hi All,

    Due to heat in Perth we have lost a number of services and precautionary shut others down.

    Customer will notice impact to the following services:

    - iiNet Toolbox and Westnet MyAccount [RESTORED 7:00PM WST]
    - Westnet Email [RESTORED 7:45PM WST]
    - Westnet Hosted Websites [RESTORED 9:00PM WST]
    - iiNet hosted email [RESTORED 7:45PM WST]
    - iiNet/Westnet/Adam/Netspace Webmail [RESTORED 7:00PM WST]
    - Customers may be unable to re-authenticate after disconnecting from the internet [RESTORED 8:00PM WST]

    A number of internal tools are also affected, which will impact our ability to respond to certain customer enquiries.

    Update 6pm WST: Due to issues with staff access, some contact centre queues have been closed. Affected queues will be reopened once the incident has been resolved.

    Update 8pm WST: Most services have been restored, Engineers are continuing to review all services impacted by the incident. Customers that were off-line are recommended to perform a modem power-cycle to get back on-line.

    Thanks,

    Basically few gen Y's screaming that they can't post their sweaty selfies for a few hours.