“Our apologies, we’re aware that certain Internet Service providers are encountering issues this morning. This means some of our customers will have issues accessing FastNet Classic and ASB mobile,” ASB posted this morning on its Facebook page.
And after Sheri Ngaha complained on Kiwibank’s Facebook page “Why can’t we get into the app or ring this morning. This is so annoying, I’m needing to transfer money but can’t,” the bank replied: “We’re currently experiencing an issue for some customers when trying to access our App or Internet Banking. Our teams are looking into this at the moment and we hope to have this resolved soon.”
An update from InternetNZ - the non-profit that administers local internet addresses - noted technical problems that hit .ac.nz (education) addresses yesterday then spread to other local domains from 10.45pm. The update said, “The issue will resolve over time”. The New Zealand Herald has asked InternetNZ for more information.
Responding to a Herald query on Twitter, cloud computing engineer Simon Lyall said, “InternetNZ was changing the key they use to sign .nz and made a mistake. So DNS [domain name server] queries are getting a certificate error.”
In other words, it seems a change designed to boost security went haywire, rendering some sites inaccessible. It seems the change related to a measure to prevent “DNS spoofing” - or maliciously redirecting a user to a fake version of a website.
On Twitter, Hamish Mack posted: “NZ sites RNZ, New World shopping online and Kiwibank sites are not working? What the heck??”
And Rebecca McMillan said the outage did not seem to have affected Govt.nz but all NZ apps and websites she used were down.
“Can’t even listen to @radionz because the mobile app is down. Yikes. Time to get a transistor radio.”
Stuart Laing posted earlier this morning: “Anybody having problems accessing .co.nz sites.nz sites seem to be ok,” but told the Herald just after 9am that his connections were now “sorted”.
One customer of One NZ (formerly Vodafone NZ) said he had issues accessing multiple .co.nz internet addresses from around 11.30pm yesterday.
A spokesman for One NZ told the Herald: “We had an issue that occurred in the wee small hours where some customers couldn’t access .nz domains when using a fixed connection, but this has been resolved.”
Major internet service providers and banks have been approached for comment.
