Widespread internet outages reported across New Zealand

There are reports of internet issues across New Zealand, including in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin.

• Broadband customers reported widespread outages across the country this evening.
• Customers took to social media about 7.30pm with their dismay about the outages.
• Devoli says the outage was caused by a route reflector in Sydney.

There have been reports of widespread internet outages across New Zealand.

At about 7.30pm, people in Auckland, Christchurch, Wellington and Dunedin began posting on social media saying they had no internet.

Many said they were Contact customers.

A post on the Vic Deals Facebook page asking if anyone had lost internet received 139 comments, with users across Wellington suburbs confirming widespread outages.

One person commented: “Sitting round the table for dinner for once cos there isn’t any wifi”.

Another said, “All I want to do is watch some YouTube videos for background noise until I fall asleep”.

On its website, network service provider Devoli said broadband issues were being caused by a route reflector in Sydney.

This would mean New Zealand local fibre providers that rely on Devoli for their connections could have their services disrupted.

“Due to slow response we have restarted devices in Auckland and Wellington,” Devoli wrote. “Investigation ongoing.”

Later, the company wrote that services were progressively being restored while engineers actively monitored the situation.

Contact chief retail officer Michael Robertson said the company’s broadband service was now back up and running after a brief and unexpected outage.

“We are working to find out why and how this happened.”

Gorilla Technology chief executive Paul Spain told the Herald outages can be caused by a wide range of issues such as misconfiguration, equipment failure or even cyber attack.

“The resolution will depend ultimately on the cause,” he said.

“Appropriately there is redundancy built in to Internet providers networks to reduce the risk of large-scale outages - and these same redundant mechanisms can also be helpful when there is a significant failure.”

Spain said a route reflector was critical equipment that helps networks know the best way for data to get to and from the right place.

“For instance when you want to stream a movie, your Smart TV, phone or computer needs to connect and retrieve the video data across the internet from an appropriate streaming server.”