Internet-based phone service disruptions affecting Telus clients last week happened because of broken service connections from hardware replacement, not because of a malicious attempt to disrupt server traffic, a spokesperson with Telus confirmed.
Telus clients with internet-based phone systems had reported service disruptions affecting both incoming and outgoing calls. Great West Newspapers, including the St. Albert Gazette, reported service disruptions on Aug. 17 and Aug. 18.
Some businesses and municipalities in Alberta had taken to social media to let their customers know about the outage, including the Town of Turner Valley.
The Gazette had reported online that the outage was due to a malicious attempt to flood network traffic after speaking with a confidential industry expert on the issue.
However, Telus spokesperson Douglas Self clarified later that the issue happened after a third-party vendor had replaced some of the hardware for a switch used to route call traffic, and unintentionally disrupted connections to the network. This only affected business clients that were connected to this switch.
"This (issue) was pretty solidly with the piece of hardware migration they didn't execute properly ... We have no evidence (of an attack) whatsoever."
Most affected clients had problems with incoming and outgoing calls for about 37 minutes, while others experienced disruptions for several hours, Self said.
Home phones or wireline phones don't usually experience issues with service – you pick up a phone, it goes to a physical cable to a physical slot where it's physically routed to another phone. Whereas with cellphones on a mobility network, hardware and satellites need to work in concert together to connect.
"It's much easier to keep (traditional phones) lined," he said.
