November 9, 2012: Southern Cross Cable Hit By An Outage

Was this the moment the cable was prepared for mass spying on New Zealand?

Southern Cross cable has reportedly been hit by a “catastrophic failure” at its Alexandria landing station in Sydney.

New Zealand Labour IT spokesperson Clare Curran said today that the outage occurred this morning due to an “unauthorised and un-notified software change” made to the wavelength switching platform.

One industry representative on the Australian Network Operators group indicated that Southern Cross had told vendors that the company was still suffering from a software upgrade issue this afternoon.

Southern Cross had not returned calls at the time of writing.

The outage is understood to be affecting Australian telecommunications and datacentre provider Vocus.

Curran said that partial services had been restored, but said that it highlighted the need for the New Zealand government to roll out a second cable out of the country.

“This is a crisis for New Zealand. Without international connectivity, our financial system and a large percentage of business would be severely affected,” she said. “The government must address the issue of international connectivity with urgency, and provide a full assessment of the risks New Zealand faces through software failures and natural events on the single cable.”

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