Text for today is 'sorry'

By MATHEW DERNALEY

Telecom has spent several days clearing a backlog of text messages after a week-long computer glitch affected thousands of cellphone-users.

The company has confirmed that a computer fault stopped messages being delivered to customers who had run out of money on their prepaid cellphones, even though the senders of the messages were charged.

Spokeswoman Linda Sanders said the main problem was fixed on Wednesday after it was brought to the company's attention by a Hamilton schoolgirl. It appeared to have begun about a week earlier.

She said that on Friday there were still some messages that had to be cleared through the system.

She said anyone charged for undelivered text messages at 20c a time should call the company's free-phone customer service number of 123 for a refund.

She was unable to estimate how many of the almost 2.5 million text messages sent every week through the Telecom system were affected.

The 18-year-old student who blew the whistle, Monique Des Forges, said many of her friends were affected and her 14-year-old sister was stranded at school after her mother did not receive a message.

Vodafone said 38,000 text messages sent from phones on its 021 network to the Telecom system were delayed for 9 1/2 hours on Wednesday because an alarm failed to alert it to the larger problem.

New software was being installed to prevent a recurrence.

Monique Des Forges said a message sent to her at 10pm on Thursday did not arrive on her phone until 4pm on Friday.

The company's unofficial monitor was able to report late yesterday that messages were now just taking a couple of minutes to get through - longer than the usual few seconds but a vast improvement on last week.

Telecom says that although text messages are "reasonably reliable", they are not foolproof, and customers are advised not to depend on them.

Consumers' Institute chief executive David Russell welcomed the company's promise to make refunds, but suggested that it did this by going through customers' phone records, rather than waiting to be asked.