Spark outage rocks residents

People were left without the use of the mobile phone yesterday as a nationwide Spark outage rocked Hawke's Bay residents.

Many Hawke's Bay residents were left without calling, text and data as Spark recovered from a nationwide outage yesterday.

Spark head of corporate communications Richard Llewellyn said the outage began at 9:15am and was caused by a hardware fault.

Teams worked to completely resolve the issue, which 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.

Julie Brock was just one of the many who were rocked by the network outage.

Ms Brock went to clock in for work at the Napier Airport just after 9am and found she was unable to get through.

"I work at Boulevard Services and we have to ring from our cell phones when we get to work and leave again on the weekends through staff tracker but nothing would go through."

Instead of using her phone Ms Brock had to use the public payphone in the airport.

"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 six times a day."

By 12:30pm broadband services were restored but Spark advised that as mobile services progressively restored, customers would still experience intermittent and residual mobile connection issues.

This was due to the large volume of devices auto-registering back on to the Spark mobile network.

Resident Sara Dale experienced this delayed reconnection and at 3:30pm yesterday was still not able to send texts or make phone calls.

She said it was frustrating for her as her son was at his dad's and she needed to arrange whether he was getting picked up or dropped off and his dad didn't have a landline.

"I also need to start planning for work on Monday and at the moment I'm not able too."

Ms Brock's phone was also still out at 3.30pm but it came back on by the time she went to work at 5pm so she could clock back in as normal.

At 6pm last night Spark released a statement which said all customers should be able to make mobile voice calls and send texts as normal but data issues may still be occurring.

"We know this is a real pain, and we're sorry for the hassles this has caused. Thanks again for your patience and we'll have everyone back up and running as soon as possible."

Some people took to Facebook to voice their 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 month's usage to my account."

With regards to offering people free credit or data Mr Llewellyn said they would look at everything on a case by case basis.

"Our main focus is getting all our mobile customers back on to the network. We appreciate that people are increasingly reliant on connectivity, but no networks are able to offer 100% guarantees."