Phone calls on hold after Telecom exchange faults

Telephone calls in the Auckland area were put on hold yesterday afternoon for more than two hours after a fault at two Telecom exchanges brought communications to a halt.

Calls to international, 0800, 1-800 and cellphone numbers were affected by a fault at the North Shore and Papatoetoe telephone exchanges from about 2pm.

Telecom spokesman Mark Watts said the problem had stabilised by about 4.30pm but it was still unclear how it started, how many customers were affected or what areas lostcoverage.

"All I can say is it is a technical issue affecting traffic from and into the Papatoetoe and North Shore exchanges which may have had a wider impact on the connections at other exchanges."

The glitch follows an Xtra service upgrade last weekend which saw hundreds of customers left without email for a day. Xtra webmail customers could not access their inboxes for 24 hours during the upgrade to the new Yahoo!Xtra Bubble service.

It is also unclear if the outage affected emergency calls put through in the Auckland area.

The Herald understands the police northern communications centre was in talks with Telecom to find out if any calls had been missed or diverted to other areas.

Mr Watts said customers with problems caused by the outage should contact Telecom.