"I asked around the airport to use someone else's phone but they were on spark too. I am just lucky it was a free phone call as we have to clock in and out multiple times a day."
Spark head of corporate communications Richard Llewellyn said the outage began at 9:15am and was caused by a hardware fault.
Teams are working to completely resolve the issue, which has impacted 263 of about 1500 Spark mobile sites in New Zealand.
"The problem was identified as a hardware fault located in one of the core Spark network exchanges and a fix has been put in place. Most impacted services restored immediately, and others are progressively self-restoring," Mr Llewellyn said.
By 12:30pm broadband services were restored but Spark advised that as mobile services progressively restore, customers may still experience intermittent and residual mobile connection issues.
This was related to the large volume of devices auto-registering back onto the spark mobile network.
Resident Sara Dale has experienced this delayed reconnection and at 3:30pm today was still not able to send texts or make phone calls.
"It is frustrating for me as my son is at his dads and I need to arrange if I'm picking him up or if he's getting dropped off and his dad doesn't have a landline," she said.
"I also need to start planning for work tomorrow and at the moment I'm not able too"
Ms Brock's phone was also still out at 3.30pm and she was preparing to clock in again for work via payphone at 5pm.
Other people took to Facebook to voice there frustration with the network and hoped Spark would be offering free credit plus data for the inconvenience caused.
"I'd be happy with a refund of this months usage to my account."
Spark have apologised for the inconvenience and Mr Llewellyn said technical teams were still working hard to completely restore mobile connectivity to customers as soon as possible.