Widespread internet outages are being felt around the North Island, telecommunications company Voyager says.
It says it has identified an issue affecting “Chorus Wellington UFB (ultrafast broadband) handover”.
“This handover services Wellington, Kapiti, Hutt Valley, Palmerston North and through to Napier.”
Voyager said Chorus had identified the source of the issue and are working on a fix.
Currently around 90 percent of connections are offline.
My team members are already indicating they’re back which surprises me.
It was so broadly impacting across companies and locations I thought of would have been really deep in the core routing - but resolved after a couple of hours
I’m back online now too. Probably just had to call up Steve and get him to turn it off and back on again.
Would love an autopsy, for sure!
The article has been updated and now says:
A spokesperson said one of the provider’s core ethernet routers serving the Wellington region experienced a temporary outage.
So they probably did just call up Steve and get him to turn it off and back on again 😅
I’d actually be interested to know more about the infrastructure they have. If one router going down can cause an outage to 90% of UFB customers across Wellington, Kapiti, Hutt Valley, Palmerston North and through to Napier, that kinda sounds pretty crazy.
Lots of the various provider’s networks have central routing in Akl, Wgn & (sometimes) Chc. So everything lower north island hauling back to Courtney Place doesn’t surprise me. For a fault like this one to impact i’d guess that either some redundancy had already been lost prior to this failure, or for some other reason it didn’t failover in a predictable & non-impacting way. It happens.
Yeah it’s pretty rare so whatever system they are using is surely working fine most of the time.
It’s also affecting phone lines, I tried to call a landline number earlier today and got nothing. I guess they use a VoIP system?
Highly likely. Commercial systems have been internet based for years. Residential landlines are very often over the internet. Spark has been moving people to 4G routers for home internet, with landlines plugged into them for VoIP. There is a plan to decommission the copper network by 2030: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/business/557618/copper-network-retirement-a-step-closer-what-you-need-to-know
Yeah, that’s not very typical. I’d like to make that point.
