111 centres go low-tech in Telecom power cut

Emergency services staff were forced to use pen and paper to take down vital information and pass it on to police, fire and ambulance dispatchers after a major Telecom breakdown.

The loss of power to a key Telecom data centre in central Auckland yesterday also caused disruptions to broadband computer links, e-mail, pager and other computerised communications around New Zealand, for much of the day.

Ambulance and Fire Service pagers were also out of action when the problem started about 6am.

South Island police and fire communication centres also switched to manual backup systems during the breakdown and reported no problems.

Sergeant Lindsay Turner, from police southern communications, said when the computer system failed, staff used pen and paper to record details and paper maps to pinpoint locations.

"We have training exercises for situations like this.

"It worked very well and did not affect services."

The computerised system was running again at midday.

Police computer services manager Rohan Mendis said staff were trained for such an event.

Auckland was a major node in the police data and communication system and it took about five hours for systems to be restored.

As far as Mr Mendis knew no emergency calls were missed.

Telecom spokeswoman Sara Berry said a cable fault cut power to a network building at 6.05am. It wasn't restored till 9.15am.

"That affected broadband services, some of Telecom's and customers' IT (computer services) including paging systems and databases, and eftpos systems like those used by taxi companies."

Anybody attempting to log onto the Internet would have had problems.

Thousands of customers could have been affected.

Asked if any compensation was available for users, she said that if anybody had a problem they should give Telecom a call.

Internet monitoring company Epitiro said Xtra and iHug services were down for about four hours.

Most other large service providers, with the exception of TelstraClear, were affected. While their traffic bottlenecked, their services stayed up.

Epitiro managing director Mike Cranna said it was surprising that a mission critical component in the network, like Telecom's Mayoral Drive exchange, could have a power outage.

"Normally an important network location like this would have multiple power supply backups available."

The outage comes just two months after a major disruption to Telecom Internet mail services when the company switched to a new Yahoo-based service.

Customers were told e-mail could be down for 24 hours, but many were unable to access their e-mail for days.

- © Fairfax NZ News