The hour-long Thursday outage of Telstra's national Internet network, which saw the inaccessibility of the Internet by BigPond customers, was probably associated with some glitch in the Internet Service Providers' domain name system (DNS), and some recent high-profile service interruptions at Sydney data centres and Telstra's "international gateways."

The disruption of the Internet service to BigPond customers, from nearly 7-8 am, reportedly affected all Telstra home and businesses broadband and mobile internet customers throughout the country.

Though Telstra officially announced that a probe is being conducted into the malfunction to ascertain the exact reasons behind it, Internet forums and micro-blogging site Twitter had countless posts referring to the problem.

According to one of the users, "Everything was working fine, including my modem, PPP connection and ADSL link when I could not access international Web sites. Some local sites were still accessible, but I was already logged on so my browser wasn't doing a DNS lookup."

Some users said that with the Internet access suddenly disrupted, the local and international Web portals like Google and Yahoo! became unreachable; while others complained of no fixed-line access, even to data centres.

Meanwhile, members of AusNOG, a local network operator's group, reported the unavailability of Next G mobile data services in Melbourne and Brisbane and Melbourne, during the outage.