Customers hit with two-day internet outage

THOUSANDS of Sydneysiders are still without internet, more than 24 hours after a damaged cable left a number of companies without a network.

Construction crews working on an apartment in the North Sydney suburb of Chatswood accidentally cut a Telstra cable yesterday morning, immediately causing a widespread outage.

Customers that use Dodo, iPrimus, Aussie Broadband and Exetel are among those affected.

The internet outage has stretched across the whole of Sydney, with customers as far as Prospect in the city’s west to customers right in the CBD losing connection.

Lawyer Stephen Goddard, who uses Exetel for his Elizabeth St offices, told the ABC he hadn’t been able to work since yesterday because he couldn’t log on to his company’s internal server.

“It’s very frustrating,” he said. “It’s not like I live out in the middle of nowhere — I’m on Elizabeth St.

“And the most frustrating part is that some other offices on my level [in the same building] have internet. I had to go home, there’s nothing I can do.

“They told me it won’t be restored till tomorrow — that means I’ll be out for 48 hours.”

Dodo is attempting to find the funny in the major outage, taking to Twitter earlier today to explain why the internet was down.

But not everyone was handling it as well as Dodo, with some of its customers claiming they’d taken too long to give customers an update.

“It’s been down for over 24 hours and you are only just now advertising it #nothappy #lostbusiness #nocommunication #badcustomerservice,” one woman wrote.

Aussie Broadband addressed the outage on Facebook yesterday, offering its “profuse apologies”.

“We have an outage affecting some customers in the Sydney region and central NSW — our profuse apologies. We’ve lodged a fault and technicians are investigating,” it wrote at 11am, almost immediately after the cable was cut.

By 4pm, technicians had repaired some of the cables and a handful of services had been restored.

“The fibre repair team have reported that splicing is ongoing on the first cable and a handful of services has been restored. They’ve also hauled and started set-up and prepping on the second cable. There is damage to 1560 fibres across four optic fibre cables, affecting a number of providers,” the company wrote.

Three of the four damaged cables have been fixed but the fourth — a specialised replacement type — had to be sourced from Melbourne and is expected to arrive in Sydney by 10am tomorrow.

Exetel’s customer service line is delivering an automated message.

“We’re are experiencing a network outage in NSW area and it is currently being investigated,” it said.

“We’re making our best attempt to restore the service as soon as possible.”

A Telstra spokesman said technicians were “repairing a fibre optic cable cut by a third party, which is impacting several thousand broadband and ADSL services as well as some wholesale services”.

“Services are progressively restoring and repair work will continue throughout the day,” the spokesman said.

The company apologised for the inconvenience and said it was “doing everything we can to restore services as quickly as possible”.

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