Thousands of people have been affected by a widespread internet outage in the South after hungry rodents and human error cut two cables.
People across Otago and Southland, including Central Otago and Queenstown, have been offline today since mid-morning.
A OneNZ spokeswoman said engineers had made successful repairs to one of the fibre network paths in the Dunedin area at 4pm. Engineers remained on site to fix the redundant second path this evening.
She confirmed that affected mobile sites were now fully restored and customers could call, text and get online as usual.
"We’d like to reiterate our apology for this issue today, and remind customers that in a scenario like this, they can make an emergency 111 call using any available network."
Employees at the Dunedin Inland Revenue are believed to have been sent home due to the outage.
The University of Otago said internet and mobile phone services were impacted and all campuses - Dunedin, Wellington, Invercargill and Auckland - had been affected, but the issue was fixed by 5pm.
Earlier, a spokeswoman for OneNZ 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.
"Today’s issues are unfortunate, caused by two separate unrelated incidents on both our cables for the region.
"We’re sorry for the inconvenience caused by this issue, our engineers are on site working to fix it and we hope to have service restored by this afternoon."
The widespread outage also appeared to affect some traffic lights in central Dunedin.
The website Down Detector indicated One New Zealand, Spark, 2degrees and Slingshot all had spikes in reports for internet outages just after 10am.
The location of the rodent damage had been found and trains had been stopped so technicians could access the site, REANNZ reported.
Shortly after 2pm, engineers had recovered about 20 cell sites by rerouting traffic and were attempting to recover more by further optimisations to the network.
A Fire and Emergency NZ spokeswoman said it had also been affected by the internet outage and had switched to its back-up system.
The outage was not impacting police in the South, a spokesman said.
"Calls are still getting through to 111 and back-up radios are in place should there be any radio issues."
Contact Energy said in a post to its website it was aware of a broadband and Contact mobile outage affecting customers in the Otago, Central Otago and Southland areas.
"Our technical team are working to resolve this as a priority. In the meantime, please don't unplug, power off or reset your modem. Our apologies for the inconvenience."
The Dunedin City Council advised on social media about 2pm that some of its services have been 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."
