In a forum posting to Whirlpool, the Australian broadband discussion board, a spokesperson for both ISPs - Jason M - revealed that the reduction in company services has been due to a prolonged DDOS attack on the ISPs for the last two weeks.

"The outages have been caused by DDOS attacks directed at our network preventing normal internet access," he said in a posting.

Infosecurity understands that neither of the two firms have issued an official statement on the attacks, although Australian newswire reports suggest that the two ISPs have been unable to determine the source of the attacks and therefore have not been able to lock out the IP addresses from where they originate from.

Forum posters on Whirlpool have surmised that this may the reason why the ISPs - which have IT operations in New South Wales - have been busy installing new equipment in their data centres.

Jason M has confirmed the installations, noting that "additional equipment has been installed in NSW in an attempt to alleviate the symptoms of the attacks when they occur, however we expect there may still be outages/network dropouts until scheduled core upgrades are complete".

"EFTel/aaNet has been in the process of performing upgrades to our core network in all states around Australia, and has brought forward the equipment upgrades for NSW in light of these current issues," he added.