Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has one simple message for Kiwis - "New Zealanders should act as if they have Covid-19" and stay at home. "Breaking the rules could kill someone close to you."
After hitting an all-time record on Tuesday, Kiwis' peak internet usage eased back noticeably yesterday - and big bandwidth-saving move by Netflix will have helped.
Overnight on Tuesday, the streaming giant reduced its bit rate - or the amount of data it sends over New Zealand's broadband networks - by 25 per cent.
A loss of bit rate can mean a loss of picture quality, but Netflix implies most customers won't notice any difference.
"If you are particularly tuned into video quality you may notice a very slight decrease in quality within each resolution. But you will still get the video quality you paid for," the company says in a blog post on its site.
Google-owned YouTube and Amazon's Prime Video are taking similar steps.
Certainly, there was an immediate impact on total traffic on the network operated by Chorus, which controls the lion's share of UFB fibre and almost all copper lines.
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Peak traffic last night reached 2.64 terabits per second, down from a peak of 2.75Tbps on Tuesday, and "still comfortably within available headroom", Chorus said this morning.
The network operator says its network could take a peak load of 3.5Tbps.
Before the Covid-19 outbreak, its record peak usage was the 2.6Tbit/s hit during the Rugby World Cup.
Although New Zealand's broadband is so far holding up well under a surge in video conferencing and lockdown entertainment streaming (unlike voice calls), Netflix has taken a better-safe-than-sorry approach - the Herald understands after talks with Communications Minister Kris Faafoi and ISPs.
The approach was first rolled out in Spain and Italy, which were among the first countries to go into lockdown.
"Given the crisis, we've developed a way to reduce Netflix's traffic on telecommunications networks by 25 per cent while also maintaining the quality of our service," a spokesperson said.
"So consumers should continue to get the quality that comes with their plan - whether it's Ultra-High, High or Standard Definition. We believe that this will provide significant relief to congested networks and will be deploying it in New Zealand for the next 30 days."
Following testing in Europe, the company says it is confident that the user experience shouldn't be affected at a local level.
The company says that shows can have as many different streams for a single title within each resolution. All it has done is simply remove the highest bandwidth streams.
Despite this massive spike, Chorus says it has a capacity for peak traffic of 3.5 terabits per second - or around 40 per cent more than last night's peak.
