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Thousands of people throughout New Zealand had problems accessing the internet this morning after a power outage in Telecom's Auckland exchange.
Telecom spokeswoman Sarah Berry said the fault happened at 6.05am and was not fixed until about 9.15am.
Radio station Newstalk ZB is reporting that the outage could have affected as many as 700,000 people.
Ms Berry said the problem would have affected people whose broadband modem was turned off overnight.
"If they had their computer and modem on overnight they had a service, but if the modem had needed to be restarted they would not have had access to broadband."
Ms Berry said the Sunday morning hours which the service was down were relatively low use times, but that Telecom was sorry for all those who were affected.
Several other Telecom information technology services have also been affected, including portable eftpos services used in places like taxis.
She said most of these services should be back up by noon.
- NZPA
