The country's biggest telecommunications firm is scrambling to fix an internet meltdown after an unexplained surge in internet traffic last night.
Spark New Zealand users have reported problems with various internet services since late last night.
"It looks like a high volume of traffic is affecting the ability of customers to browse intermittently on broadband or mobile," Spark spokesman Richard Llewellyn said shortly after 9am.
Spark's website has instructions to manually specify your DNS server settings, which may be useful.
At midday, a Spark spokesman said the problem had been determined to be a denial of service attack by malware.
"It's not an issue with the Spark network - it's because computers are sending out an enormous amount of traffic due to malicious overseas malware, that's been inadvertently installed on NZ computers by some Spark customers."
A frustrated internet user told the Herald on Sunday he had to spend 29 minutes on the phone when he called Spark for answers this morning.
He said he was redirected to an overseas call centre where staff couldn't tell him what the problem was.
"A handful of our customers' computers have been infected with malware and that's generating very high volumes of traffic to overseas sites," Spark spokesman Conor Roberts said.
This traffic was slowing down web access for broadband and mobile Spark customers.
Company technicians were trying to locate to fix the problem.
"They've been working all night to identify where those information requests are coming from and close them down," Roberts said, but he added the situation was "dynamic" and the dodgy information requests kept changing.
"Once they've identified one, it shifts to another."
Roberts said it wasn't clear what the motive behind the requests was. "These kind of things aren't uncommon. They affect different networks around the world but this one for us is quite unusual."
Spark says customers should keep their malware and anti-virus protection updated and avoiding clicking any suspicious links.
For those with internet access, the company has information on its website, Facebook page and Twitter feed.
Spark has approximately 669,000 broadband internet customers."
The company, formerly known as Telecom, was rebranded as Spark on August 8.
- by John Weekes, Herald on Sunday
