Telecom forgiven for freak outage

Damage to Telecom's reputation from yesterday's huge telecommunications outage is likely to be minimal.

Industry observers say it was a bizarre accident that "could happen to anyone".

"I think getting two accidents of this type at the same time is a freak occurrence," Communications Minister David Cunliffe said.

He said Telecom had done a good job in restoring service, which was affected by two separate incidents.

A fibre cable on a bridge in the Rimutakas was damaged. Telecom was still investigating this "fibre break" late yesterday.

Services were rerouted until a Taranaki post-hole digger hit a second fibre cable later in the morning. Services were restored at 3.18pm.

The Telecommunications Users Association of New Zealand also spoke kindly of Telecom.

"TUANZ has never had occasion to criticise Telecom for the reliability of their network - they rate very well against most countries for networking and servicing reliability," chief executive Ernie Newman said.

"This is obviously a once-only event.

"We have confidence in the technical integrity of the network and don't believe it's a sign of a trend."

Telecom investors didn't pass a harsh sentence on the company either, with the stock slipping only 3c to $6.10.

The disruption affected landlines, mobile phones, internet services and Eftpos.

The stock exchange was a notable victim, closed for trading from 11.01am until 4pm after Auckland customers advised of communication problems.

The exchange stayed open for an extra 30 minutes until 5.30pm once trading resumed.

Brokers were annoyed, especially as it was the second trading halt within a week, both due to Telecom faults.

"It's enormously frustrating that you can't do your job," one broker said.

He said such stoppages added to uncertainty around the market and investors "hate" uncertainty.

Forest products company Carter Holt Harvey had problems with faxes, phones, email and some web-based office systems, but said the outage would not have any material impact on performance.

"We're not really blaming Telecom for this one," said IT chief Pat O'Connell.

"It was just darn bad luck."

A spokesperson for Air New Zealand said lack of internet and email forced the airline to manually check in passengers yesterday.

That caused some delays to flights, but none was cancelled.

There was an issue for about two hours but, in the end, all the passengers got where they wanted to go.