People across Otago and Southland, including Central Otago and Queenstown, were offline from 10am to 4pm yesterday after faults in One NZ’s network took out its main and back-up lines.
The University of Otago said its internet and cellphone services were affected and all campuses — Dunedin, Wellington, Invercargill and Auckland — had been affected.
A One NZ spokeswoman said the outage was caused by rodents chewing through a cable near Dunedin and a contractor accidentally cutting through the secondary cable between Gore and Balclutha.
"We aim to make our network as resilient as possible, and our network is set up to have a secondary fibre cable in place in case one is accidentally cut.
"[Yesterday’s] issues [were] unfortunate, caused by two separate unrelated incidents on both our cables for the region."
The internet outage was resolved by 4pm after One NZ engineers made successful repairs to one of the fibre network paths in the Dunedin area.
Technology Users Association of New Zealand chief executive Craig Young said it was unfortunate any time a network dropped out due to such errors, and it raised questions about what plans were in place to ensure networks were resilient.
"That shows how vulnerable our networks can be and it could be caused by all sorts of reasons."
The contractor’s role came down to work practices, while rodents being involved led one to question whether the infrastructure in question was being managed properly, or "actually being looked after", Mr Young said.
"These things do happen — rodents get in all sorts of places.
"But, having said that, given that the network owners know that these sorts of things happen, then they need to be able to build networks that can cope with that."
Both cables going down proved the network "was not as resilient as they might have thought or hoped", he said.
"They absolutely need to get to the bottom of how these occurred ... How could we have that size of area taken down by two simple little faults?"
A KiwiRail spokesman said train services around Dunedin were unaffected by the internet outage and continued running.
KiwiRail engineers were working in the Sawyers Bay Tunnel on the issue with appropriate safety measures in place.
Port Chalmers resident Katie Brockie, who is a tutor at the University of Otago, said her plans to mark assignments were derailed by the internet outage,
Her internet and phone service went out about 10am when she was partway through marking an assignment.
Ms Brockie said her fellow tutors would have also struggled to finish their marking.
She found the situation funny, but also a "pain".
The Dunedin City Council advised on social media about 2pm that some of its services were affected.
"While most of our facilities are still operational, we’re having difficulties with some of our phone lines and payment systems.
"We apologise for any inconvenience and ask that you be patient with us while we wait for full services to be restored."
