Less than Optimal

If you’ve tried to access this blog lately from the Optus network, I’m going to make an educated guess and say that you haven’t been able to.

I have an Optus Cable Internet service at home and about two weeks ago I started to be unable to access my blog. At first I put it down to a temporary network glitch and didn’t worry about it. But the problem presisted and I started be become a bit stumped as to what was happening. Every other website on the Net loaded ok, but my own blog was inaccessible. I could get to it from work, and from my phone over Telstra 4G and pretty much anywhere except from home on my Optus service.

Then last week I got an email from a reader who said that she also couldn’t access the blog and, surprise surprise, she is also on the Optus network. Nor could a friend of hers, who is, you guessed it, also on the Optus network. So I put a note out on Twitter to ask who could access the blog and which ISP they were using. 100% of Optus users could not access it. Everyone else could.

I don’t think you need to be a network engineer to figure out where to problem lies here.

So I called Optus Tech Support and spend several frustrating hours over several frustrating calls, during which I was asked to reset my cable modem (clearly not the problem) and numerous other diagnostics that were also clearly not the problem. The Traceroute told the story, terminating in a black hole of Optus servers.

Optus eventually told me that their system had flagged my blog as having “malicious content”, but were unable to tell me exactly what that meant or identify the algorithms that might be flagging it. Nor could they suggest how to fix it, other than just wait until something might change.

On my second call to Tech Support I escalated it to a supervisor who was rudely insistent that the problem was not with Optus, and denied that Optus was blocking anything, which completely contradicted the information I was given on the previous call. I think that’s a technique used to just get the customer off the line, called Making Shit Up.

The battle continues. It’s no wonder so many people dislike Optus.

CC BY 4.0 Less than Optimal by Chris Betcher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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