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Emergency services had to use manual back-up systems yesterday after a power failure at Telecom.
Fire, police and ambulance communications centres throughout New Zealand were affected, but 111 emergency calls were not.
All systems were back up and running yesterday afternoon.
The fault occurred at 6.05am at a Telecom exchange in central Auckland.
It also affected about 15,000 broadband, dial-up and mobile internet users, though most had their service back by 10am.
The Fire Service lost its computer dispatch system, and had to use pens, paper and whiteboards to keep track of staff and equipment.
Communications director Ian Pickard said the public hadn't been affected in any way.
"We practise the fall-back systems every month. Going back to manual systems is something that is practised regularly. It's no big deal.
"We've responded appliances to every incident we've had. No problem.
"We had to go back to manual systems of using pens and papers and talking on radios, rather than it being automated."
Telecom yesterday apologised for the cut, saying it did everything it could to fix the problem as quickly as possible.
Spokeswoman Sarah Berry said the cause of the problem was unknown, but it could have been a cable fault.
The police computer system was also affected, said information and communications technologies manager Rohan Mendis.
"We lost the ID network serving the north and all the other communications centres came down."
The automatic dispatch system was out of action, but staff were able to handle the load manually, Mr Mendis said.
Northern ambulance communications team manager Murray Bannister said technical issues had caused some extra work, but there had been no problems affecting service of any significance.
Several other Telecom information technology services were also affected, including portable eftpos machines used in places such as taxis.
Some paging services were also affected, and Telecom's internal IT systems were disrupted.
- additional reporting NZPA
