Major outage hits Xtra subscribers

1.00pm - By RICHARD WOOD

UPDATE - Telecom Xtra was hit this morning by a major outage across the country affecting up to 400,000 dial-in internet subscribers.

Its network status page was listing connection problems preventing access in every region.The problem began around 4am and was resolved around 12.30pm.

It impacted both Xtra customers and customers of other internet providers.

Xtra Marketing director Chris Thompson said connection difficulties did not affect Jetstream fast internet customers and not every dialup customer."

It would have been intermittent - not all customers, not all of the time," he said.

Thompson initially said the problem appeared to be in the core Telecom network, but later said that would depend how the core network is defined.

Telecom advertises its core network as 99.999 per cent reliable which would only allow it to be unreliable for only around 5 minutes a year.

Thompson said it looks like the issue was a "failover" problem with a ethernet router in a very busy part of the network that serves a lot of other systems.He said the problem is all resolved now - "fingers crossed."