Telstra's utility hosting service suffers hiccup

Telstra has confirmed an outage of its utility hosting service last Sunday was due to a "software defect" triggered after scheduled maintenance.

A source told iTnews that the service — which consists of shared virtual servers and local storage (pdf) — was down for most of Sunday July 1.

The length of the outage could not be independently verified.

A spokeswoman for the carrier told iTnews that it had "replaced a ... secondary fabric interconnect switch" within the core hosting network after midnight on Sunday during planned maintenance works.

"Under normal circumstances these types of maintenance activities can be performed without causing any interruption to customers," the spokeswoman said.

"However, in this case, the change triggered a software defect which caused a failure in the environment."

The outage did not impact customers of Telstra's dedicated hosting service, only those on the shared utility hosting service.

Though the timing of the outage roughly coincided with global issues caused by "leap second" Linux kernel bug, Telstra's spokeswoman confirmed this was not the cause.

The leap second bug impacted Amadeus airline reservation systems (taking out Qantas and other airlines) and a slew of popular websites.