Natalie Tran Fingered in Australia Internet Outage

May 17, 2012

Australia's national telecommunications operator Telstra has announced that broadband speeds in Oz will slow to a trickle in the coming days due to the overloading of one of its undersea cables linking the island nation to North America.

The Telstra Endeavour submarine cable - which connects Australian computers to the wider Internet though the U.S. state of Hawaii - is dangerously overcapacity due almost entirely to Americans attempting to view videos of Australia's vlogette fatale: Natalie Tran

"Its mostly Americans trying to get more of Nat. We've never seen traffic like this."

The 25 year old Tran has become one of the English speaking world's leading internet celebrities by way of her popular Youtube skein communitychannel.

Starting as stream-of-consciousness vlog in 2006, her videos have evolved into short, tightly-structured Larry Davidesque sketches which explore geek culture and the awkward banality of life.

With over 426 million views to date Tran is said to have more viewers than most leading Australian television shows, a fact which became all too apparent this week as the Endeavour crisis unfolded.

Gerald Gibson, a Telstra network engineer, explains:

"We've never seen traffic like this.And its mostly Americans trying to get more of Nat. The pipe was designed for 1.2 terrabits a second, but every time she uploads a video it spikes to 1.8. The poor pipe,  she can't handle the pressure anymore."

Annuit cœptis

With millions of views a day Americans are enamored with the Aussie-accented wit of the Sydney born second-generation child of Vietnamese immigrants.

However, a sizable number seem to believe that Tran is actually an inexplicably younger, prettier version of the Canadian actress Grace Park:

"I loved her in BSG," says a subscriber in Austin, Texas "but I didn't know she could be so funny!"

A viewer in Danbury, Connecticut adds "Who knew Canadians sounded so different in real life?"

The company says the cable should be back to operating normally within a week. In the mean time her fellow Australians will know who to blame.

In a preemptive act of contrition to her countrymen, Tran has generously offered to make Lamingtons for anyone affected by the outage.

  • Mike

    She wasn’t fingered. She was thumbed (hard) during some porno music.