Editorial: Network outage sparks fury

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Our telecommunications giant was slain by a mysterious assassin at the weekend.

Formerly known as Telecom, the company now dubbed Spark initially blamed its Saturday's outage on malicious overseas software (malware) which subsequently brought about an enormous amount of traffic.

At the user-end, this meant slow or denied access for its broadband and mobile customers. Without cellphone coverage for much of Saturday, I initially shrugged it off. Yet the scale of the problem dawned while sitting at Napier's McLean Park for the All Blacks test later that evening. While one can never be sure what percentage of the 22,164 muster were Spark customers, within our immediate rows the most common conversation (usually peppered with expletives) was the lack of cellphone coverage.

The consequences ranged from trivial to not so trivial.

Messages sent to my brother somewhere in the stadium suggesting a halftime beer, and photos of the ground texted home to the kids on the couch, were to no avail.

Media teams reporting live from the game also experienced tremors, and unfortunately for us, many visitors thought the problem was localised.

Unable to call our sober driver for a rendezvous point, we stood in the rain outside the stadium, cursing Spark at the end of each failed call.

The meltdown remains a mystery.

Yesterday, the only reference to the fiasco on the company's website was the following: "Network traffic has returned to normal. Apologies to anyone inconvenienced by the issues over the weekend, we will continue to monitor the situation".

Apology conditionally accepted. After all, an unreserved apology from this mammoth provider would be best received by way of a reduced invoice next month.