Telstra Internet Outage cripples connectivity: Fix it yourself with DNS changes

There couldn’t be a worse time for Telstra’s home internet services to go down with millions of Victorians in lockdown due to the COVID-19 outbreaks we’ve never been more reliant on the internet.

Hundreds of reports on Social Media triggered by the outage led Telstra to respond saying they are aware of the problem:

The problem is related to Telstra’s DNS servers, the computers that help route your requests for content and ensure the message gets through.

When you type EFTM.com into a browser, your DNS servers see that, and work out that you want to go to 172.67.72.185 – but advertising those numbers wouldn’t be the easiest thing for us now would it?

So without DNS, your requests for all websites, your streaming apps on your TV and pretty much every part of your home internet simply won’t work.

Fortunately the outage appears limited to Telstra’s home broadband network, including their NBN connections, but not any Telstra Mobile services.

There’s no estimate as to when it will be restored, in the meantime, many users have reported success with updating their DNS servers locally on their home network, to bypass Telstra’s faulty servers.

UPDATE: Telstra has identified the issue as a cyber attack or Denial of Service on their DNS servers, a spokesperson telling EFTM “We’ve identified a cyber security attack which is seeking to attack some of our services.

We’re blocking that malicious traffic and, as a consequence, that’s having an impact on nbn services.

When we’re comfortable that we’ve blocked all of the malicious traffic, we’ll get services back up and running.

It’s important to note no customer information is at risk.”

Open and free DNS is available from DNS and other providers, EFTM’s recommendation is to use the Cloudflare DNS servers, ranked among the fastest online.

The Primary DNS is 1.1.1.1 and the Secondary DNS is 1.0.0.1.

You can change these in your router/modem if you know how to access the router admin page, or you can make this change manually within your device itself.

This is a great guide to making those DNS changes on various devices.