The Optus outage was indeed iBGP, and it affected the underlying data routing across their network. That was visible in their Internet service. Have you seen any reports of AT&T fixed broadband having been affected? If it had anything to do with peering, that would also have been down. The fact that AT&T was urging affected customers to switch to "wi-fi calling" and that that was mostly working, would seem to indicate that there were not problems on the data network. That some "wi-fi calls" were not going through can be attributed, like the people complaining to T-Mobile and Verizon, to people trying to reach AT&T mobile customers.
Again, I don't yet have a theory that I believe holds water, I'm just trying to rule out things that appear to be contradicted by the facts as reported thus far.
If you haven't looked closely at network performance analysis before, this guy is using very sound methodology, without doing anything ridiculous or gold-plated.
Google and Microsoft have been trying, for the last fifteen years or so, to turn email from an open-standards based commons, to a walled garden in which it's impossible to send or receive email unless you're a customer of one or the other of them. They've been making it more and more difficult for anyone who's not a customer of either Google or Microsoft to send mail to, or receive mail from, anyone who's not. That mostly consists of silently discarding emails which should cross out of the walled garden, and then vaguely blaming everyone else. Also a lot of hand-waving about spam and security. This particular change is about prohibiting their own customers from using non-Google apps to access Google mail.
You can't be banned from using social media, just banned from using centralized for-profit walled gardens. Long live the fediverse! Or Usenet, for that matter.
@SexyCyborg has issued a new edition of Bunnie Huang's _Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen_. Looking forward to putting it on my bookshelf along side the first edition.
Executive Director of Packet Clearing House. Chair of the Quad9 Foundation Council, president of EcoRace. Dad of two rambunctious girls, car guy. AS42, 715, & 3856.