Telecom NZ suffers large-scale systems failure

Nationwide issue also downs Chorus.

A systems failure this morning has taken a large portion of Telecom New Zealand’s nationwide users offline, leaving customers without access to online systems for several hours and with no service restoration in sight.

The ongoing fault follows a planned upgrade yesterday. Telecom NZ-related sites such as telecom.co.nz and wireline.co.nz are not resolving in the global domain name system (DNS) and cannot be reached.

A spokesperson for the telco told iTnews the fault was “not necessarily” a DNS fault, but related to a switch at its Mayoral Drive exchange in Auckland.

Customers are unable to call Telecom while the fault is ongoing, the spokesperson said. Email servers are also unreachable.

Landlines and the emergency 111 service are not affected by the outage, nor are the telco’s mobile phone or broadband networks, the spokesperson said.

The telco was unable to provide a service restoration time, but the spokesperson said technicians were working to restore service “as soon as possible”. She declined to say how many customers were affected by the fault.

Network infrastructure company Chorus – which was structurally separated from Telecom NZ and which still shares some back-end systems with the incumbent – is also being affected by the system failure.

A Chorus spokesperson said the company’s wholesale customers were currently being prevented from accessing fault reporting, restoration and ordering systems.

“We can confirm that our website is down, and that it is a DNS issue,” the Chorus spokesperson told iTnews.

A Chorus fault notice sighted by iTnews informed customers a great many of the company’s customer facing systems were affected.

“Chorus continue to experience an outage of various internal systems, including OFM, SPM, SSP, Chorus Portal and our inbound phone queues company-wide.

Currently we are unable to complete any provisioning or fault restoration work. Please phone through any medical emergencies via the following escalation channels:”

Telecom NZ’s last significant networking issue occured four years ago when its new Alcatel-Lucent supplied XT mobile phone network failed on multiple occasions. The telco was forced to compensate customers for the outage.

Read more: http://www.itnews.com.au/News/385791,telecom-nz-suffers-large-scale-systems-failure.aspx#ixzz328Hi69Bx