Telkom said that planned maintenance to add new IP addresses to the network was behind the country wide ADSL outage which occurred on Friday, 7 June 2013.
Telkom explained that on Friday at 15h30 its staff performed scheduled planned maintenance work to add new IP addresses to the ADSL network.
“The type of planned maintenance undertaken was classified as non-invasive, low risk and a very mature process routinely used to add new IP addresses to the network,” said Telkom.
“Unfortunately a problem occurred immediately after commencing the planned maintenance and this resulted in all live ADSL sessions being ‘reset’; commencing approximately 15h49.”
Telkom said that a standard session reset takes on average around 2 minutes, however, the high number of simultaneous reset attempts due to the problem put a significant load on authentication servers.
This high authentication server load caused the resets to take longer than normal and were experienced by customers as downtime.
“The focus, since the problem occurred, was on getting services working and stable as soon as possible,” said Telkom.
“This was largely achieved with most services being back up and stable since approximately 17h30 on Friday afternoon. Telkom has also confirmed this with some of the major ISPs”.
Telkom said it has now commenced an in-depth investigation into the scripts, processes and underlying network control elements to establish the root cause in order to prevent this from happening in the future.
Telkom apologised to ADSL customers that have experienced an interruption to their ADSL services.
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Load shedding worked so well in driving up electricity prices for Eskom, i wouldn’t be surprised if Telkom are toying with the idea. Aren’t monopolies wonderful.