Wednesday, April 18, 2007

An Internet outage in New Zealand has left tens of thousands of people without Internet access for over five hours after a planned upgrade crashed Telecom’s servers.

Telecom, New Zealand’s telecommunications monopolistic company, had planned for an upgrade to its network overnight but it didn’t quite go to plan as their network crashed at around 4.00 a.m. (NZST) until around 11.00 a.m., when it was restored. Telecom has said that either customers lost their connection altogether, or could not access some websites.

The network outage also affected other ISP’s who purchase their services off Telecom. Vodafone’s ihug, TelstraClear, Slingshot, Callplus, Quicksilver, MaxNet, Woosh, World Exchange, ICONZ, and, of course, Xtra were all the affected ISPs.

Another network outage, again, left broadband subscribers without Internet for around 20 minutes, from 11.20 a.m. to 11.40 a.m..

The outage affected international and national websites, and e-mail services of both residential and some corporate customers.

Telecom says that they are still investigating the full reason for why the outage occurred, but they do know it was related to a problem with a broadband router in Auckland.

Spokesperson, Sarah Berry has said that Telecom will consider compensation case by case for affected customers.

Some people still had limited Internet access though, including Wikinews reporter, Gabriel Pollard. Gabriel Pollard has said that he was able to access his Gmail account, some pages of Wikinews, and some pages would start to load but never finish. He described it as “painfully slow.” Mr Pollard says that it took a while to log onto his work e-mail as their TelstraClear Internet connection wasn’t working.

The network is still being monitored for any other problems that may arise.