Phone downtime pbx1-a

[matt]

Down time on the phone network for some users.

Voice users connected to pbx1-a had their services interrupted at approximately 3:10pm on Monday the 11th of November.

The outage was caused by a large volume of incoming users when a major fiber was restored isolating some locations in Sydney's South west. As the users all attempted to reconnect to the voice network our network automated systems detected the flood of inbound users as a type of network attack and as a result blocked a large amount of users from the network.

Spectrum staff disabled this system at approximately 3:20pm and normal voice service was restored however within 10 minutes of us disabling the attack detection system a real fraud attempt was initiated from an unknown server in France. This has the effect of flooding system resources and disabling the phone network again.

Spectrum staff detected the remote attack and blocked it at approximately 3:50pm and then restored the automated system at around 4:00pm

A review of the automated system will be undertaken to see how it's operation can be improved.