Extreme Heat Knocks Out Internet In Australia

An anonymous reader writes with news that offensive weathercaused internet connectivity problems for users in Perth, Western Australia on Monday. But it wasn’t raging storms or lightning that caused this outage — it was extreme heat. Monday was the 6th hottest day on record for Perth, peaking around 44.4 C (111.9 F).

Thousands of iiNet customers across Australia found themselves offline for approximately six & a half hours after the company shut down some of its systems at its Perth data center at approximately 4.30pm AEDST because of record breaking-temperatures. … “[W]e shut down our servers as a precautionary measure,” an iiNet spokesman said late Monday night. “Although redundancy plans ensured over 98 per cent of customers remained unaffected, some customers experienced issues reconnecting to the internet.” …

Users in Western Australia, NSW, Victoria & South Australia took to Twitter, Facebook & broadband forum Whirlpool to post their frustrations to the country’s second largest DSL internet service provider.