WILD storms pounding the north western states of America have wiped out one of Australia's major internet traffic routes to the US.
Southern Cross Cable operations vice president, Dean Veverka, has confirmed that hurricane-strength storms and flooding have wiped out the carrier's Oregon cable route and halved its bandwidth between Australian and the US. Southern Cross's customers in Australia include iiNet, Internode and AAPT.
The cable had been severed between its Nedonna Beach and Hillsboro facilities, Mr Veverka said. The company has a secondary cable that reaches the US coast via Hawaii and California.
The outage has already begun hitting Australian internet providers. Greg Bader , the chief technology officer with Perth-based internet provider iiNet said it had already begun prioritising time-sensitive traffic to manage the outage.
"We're certainly operating on less capacity than would be considered ideal at the moment. We're not really seeing it in the call centres at the moment but it’s probably affecting some gamers but core operations are still humming along," Mr Bader said.
It's understood that AAPT has begun contacting customers warning them to expect network interruptions.
Mr Veverka said that the impact of the outage would depend on how customers configured their networks.
"It's hard to say because the network is designed for cable breaks. That's why we have two diverse paths , so the other one is working fine.
"It's really how individual ISPs configure their networks and re-route their IP traffic ."
Southern Cross has not revealed when it will be able to restore the service but said that it would keep customers informed.
