AARNet router failure sinks international path

Australia's academic and research network AARNet suffered an outage today due to a border router hardware failure, leaving researchers without access to points of presence in the United States.

AARNet media and communications manager Jane Gifford told iTnews an equipment fault in Sydney was continuing to cause intermittent connectivity issues to some international sites at the time of writing.

"The faulty equipment has been isolated and is being investigated by the vendor and AARNet engineers," she said.

"Meanwhile, international traffic is flowing via diverse paths."

According to fault notices sent out by AARNet, the traffic is being routed via the Southern Cross Cable network. The network operator warned there may be some congestion as traffic converges.

A further notice said the outage was due to a faulty router line card. It revealed the card was being replaced but did not provide an estimated time of resolution.

AARNet selected Juniper as its hardware partner two years ago to upgrade the academic network's backbone to 100 gigabit/s Ethernet.

AARNet operates high-capacity internet connectivity links, with 120 gigabit/s aggregate bandwith to North America and 5Gbps to Asia. It is credited with bringing the internet to Australia.