Telecom down…again

A "significant minority" of Telecom customers are again experiencing connection issues this morning, following two outages yesterday.

Over 300,000 customers across New Zealand were left without broadband from 9:45pm last night as the telco company struggled with the aftermath of earlier problems.

Telecom says the server was fixed at around 11:35pm last night, with company spokesperson Andrew Pirie saying connection problems were still continuing this morning.

"There are a significant minority of our customers who are experiencing what seems to be intermittent problems this morning, in terms of connecting," he said.

"It doesn't seem to be all customers ... it's not necessarily even the same customers all the time, people are coming and going in terms of their ability (to connect).

"We believe this may be a capacity issue on the server given we've got only one server working now.

"We're looking to try to resolve this as quickly as we can.

"The problem meant customer modems were failing to authenticate when trying to communicate with the server.

"The Auckland server normally runs in parallel with a Christchurch based server and service was initially restored by removing the Auckland server from the system and running solely on the Christchurch server.

"Yesterday afternoon service resumed on both parallel servers, but last evening further problems were experienced with the Christchurch server overloading due to issues synchronising information between the two servers.

"To address this issue, the Christchurch server was taken off the system late last night, with internet traffic now all going through the Auckland server."

As Telecom "urgently investigates" the outages, they refused to compensate any customers who lost productivity during the connection issues.

"The broadband and the mobile network, there's no guarantees around that service - that's in the terms and conditions that people sign up to at the front," Telecom said.

"In this instance it was resolved relatively quickly, and the fact [is] that it happened relatively early in the morning, when not many people would have been using their internet."

Did you have connection problems this morning? Tell us your thoughts below