'Natural radiation event' knocks NBN Sky Muster satellite offline

NBN Co suffered a large-scale outage of its Sky Muster satellite internet service on Wednesday that impacted "most" of its network.

The problems started at about 9.30am AEST and were resolved by around 4.30pm.

“The NBN satellite network experienced a loss of connectivity impacting approximately 60,000 users nationwide, that are connected to satellite 1A only,” NBN Co said in an advisory notice.

“Customers may have experienced a loss of service or be unable to reattach to the NBN satellite network.”

The advisory stated - somewhat garbled - that “network engineers have confirmed that a 31 degree roll on the satellite spacecraft switching traffic to a backup computer, which has caused traffic to become muted. The antennas will now be realigned to unmute traffic.”

iTnews was attempting to seek clarification of the documented cause of the outage.

NBN Co since said in a series of tweets that it suspected the satellite "experienced a natural radiation event – similar to an extreme weather event – and went into self-preservation mode to avoid being damaged."

"Natural radiation events are common in space and are known to disrupt a range of satellite services," it said.

During recovery, an NBN Co spokesperson added, "The satellite is still in orbit and in communication with NBN Co network engineers."

NBN Co’s Sky Muster service is delivered using two satellites, 1A and 1B.

Impacted Sky Muster services showed a white status ring on the customer premises equipment, retail service providers reported.