Former All Black Adam Thomson has vented his frustration at being put on hold for two hours by Spark.
The blind-side flanker started tweeting when his call reached the one hour mark, asking if anyone had broken that record.
At one hour and 21 minutes he queried whether Spark took music requests.
After an hour and 37 minutes he said: "It's a war of attrition now. Will @SparkNZ's Filipino call centre answer first or will my battery die?"
After two hours he said the call was cut. When he tried phoning back the call centre was closed, he said.
Spark said in a statement that Thomson may have initially called its 123 call centre which closes at 8pm. It was possible he was then transferred to its 24/7 Broadband Helpdesk, which had a wait time of about one hour and 20 minutes last night.
Spark had contacted Thomson on Twitter about 9.50pm yesterday and again this morning at 6.20am offering help.
"We asked him to direct message us his phone number and some more information so we could look into it, but unfortunately we didn't hear back from him," the statement said.
"If the call centres are busier, people can request a call back on the phone, or if they have internet access (including on their mobile) they can check the call wait times on our website, book a call back at a convenient time, or jump on our 24/7 online live chat, which tends to have a much lower wait time.
"We apologise to Adam and anyone else who had to wait longer than usual to get through to us last night."