Telkom has issued an apology to customers for an unplanned ADSL interruption on Friday.
The company states that on Friday, 7 June at 15:30, its 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.
Unfortunately, a problem occurred immediately after commencing the planned maintenance, and this resulted in all live ADSL sessions being “reset”; commencing approximately 15:49.
“ADSL users would be accustomed to a modem or session resets taking on average two minutes,” according to a statement from Telkom.
“However, the high number of simultaneous reset attempts due to the problem put a significant load on authentication servers and thus the resets took 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. This was largely achieved with most services being back up and stable since approximately 17:30 on Friday afternoon. Telkom has also confirmed this with some of the major ISPs.”
Telkom has initiated 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 apologises to all ADSL customers that have experienced interruption to their ADSL services,” the organisation states.