Broadband internet outage affects thousands in New Zealand; causes and explained

Residents across New Zealand faced internet outage between 7 and 8:30 PM on Tuesday (May 20, resulting in a large portion of online work coming to a halt. Contact Energy broadband customers across New Zealand, including those in Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch, experienced the outage, which was attributed to a route reflector issue in Sydney, according to network service provider Devoli.

The outage continued for a couple of hours before Contact Energy reports services were restored. The broadband service provider is investigating the cause of the outage.

"Due to slow response we have restarted devices in Auckland and Wellington," Devoli wrote. "Investigation ongoing."


The company later stated that services were being progressively restored while engineers actively monitored the situation.

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Contact chief retail officer Michael Robertson confirmed that the company’s broadband service was back up and running. “We are working to find out why and how this happened.”

Contact Energy has advised customers still experiencing problems to turn their modem off and back on. More than a 100,000 people in New Zealand use Contact broadband service.

Social media users shared their experiences of the outage. A post on the Vic Deals Facebook page asking about internet loss received 139 comments from users across Wellington suburbs.

One person commented: “Sitting round the table for dinner for once cos there isn’t any wifi”.

Another said, “All I want to do is watch some YouTube videos for background noise until I fall asleep”.

Gorilla Technology chief executive Paul Spain explained that outages can stem from various issues. These include misconfiguration, equipment failure, or even cyber attacks.

“The resolution will depend ultimately on the cause,” he said. “Appropriately there is redundancy built in to Internet providers networks to reduce the risk of large-scale outages - and these same redundant mechanisms can also be helpful when there is a significant failure.”

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Spain clarified the role of a route reflector. He said it is critical equipment that helps networks determine the best path for data transmission.

“For instance when you want to stream a movie, your Smart TV, phone or computer needs to connect and retrieve the video data across the internet from an appropriate streaming server.”

Chorus reported fixing vandalism that took hundreds of Aucklanders offline a few days prior to this event.