Telecom systems still down

NZ Herald

19 May, 2014 02:45 AM3 mins to read

File photo / Dean Purcell

How is the Telecom outage affecting you? Contact the Herald here.

Telecom customers are suffering under a major technical fault today, with many of the company's systems having been shut down for most of the day.

The fault has also caused issues for infrastructure company and ultra-fast broadband builder Chorus, which split from Telecom in 2011 to become a standalone firm.

Chorus said this afternoon it had some IT systems "within the Telecom environment" and as a result had lost use of some of the internal systems where internet companies order new connections.

Some of its customers inbound phone lines were not working and the company's website, Chorus.co.nz, was down.

Chorus' external email was also not working.

The fault has also meant Telecom's own corporate website down.

Telecom spokeswoman Lucy Fullarton told the Herald it was difficult to say how many people had been affected because the fault was also impacting customers' ability to get in contact with Telecom.

The fault is affecting call centres, online services, and internal Telecom networks, as well as some corporate clients.

"It's important to point out that people's ability to call and text has not been impacted," Fullarton said.

All other Telecom customers can still use data, and 111 services are not affected.

Telecom is still unable to give an estimated time to resolve the issue but said technicians are working on the problem.

Fullarton said earlier this morning in an emailed news release that today's outage was unrelated to a Telecom systems' upgrade, which took place over the weekend.

See Telecom's Facebook page with discussion of the fault here.

Earlier this year, the email accounts of tens of thousands of Telecom Xtra customers were attacked by cyber hackers resulting in a deluge of spam from pranksters and fraudsters.