Telstra users locked out of US hosting servers

A number of Telstra broadband customers were locked out of certain websites and email accounts yesterday after what appears to be a routing issue rendered US-based hosting servers inaccessible.

Sources told iTnews US-based hosting services including Bluehost, Hostgator, JustHost and Hostsave were blocked last night for Australian users on Telstra's network.

The issue started surfacing early in the day and hit en masse at around 10pm last night, according to aussieoutages.com.

Both businesses and personal users were affected.

"No access to our two dedicated servers in the US," Chris Sylvester wrote on Facebook.

"This issue has affected over 200 of our client's websites and over 700 email users. Spent hours on the phone trying to explain DNS to [techs] that want me to restart my modem.

"Finally get through to someone who admits there's a routing/DNS issue with Telstra Global only to be told that there's no sign of a resolution. Just horrible."

Affected customers shifted to free VPN services to work around the issue.

Telstra said the problem lay with an upstream provider.

“We received reports yesterday from Telstra customers that they were unable to access some websites hosted primarily by Bluehost, Hostgator, JustHost and HostMonster," a spokesperson said.

“We identified that our customers were being impacted by a router failure with a US-based service provider.

“The issue was not in our network but we worked with the US service provider overnight to resolve the issue on their end, for our customers.”

The issue puts more heat on a telco already struggling with the fallout from a national service outage on Tuesday following what chief operating offcier Kate McKenzie termed an "embarrassing human error.

Services were down for mobile, home phone and internet customers for three hours after a technician restarted a core network switch within one of Telstra's mobile nodes without first transferring customers elsewhere.

Telstra has promised its customers a day of free data on Sunday as a mea culpa.