Stories by Kirsty Johnston

Outages affect Orcon

Telecommunications provider Orcon is experiencing a major outage, cutting off internet and phone access to customers across the country.
Services first went down late on Monday night, then again from lunchtime today.
Orcon’s call centre and phone lines have also been affected, so the company is using Twitter to tell customers about the problem.
It tweeted, "Outage is still continuing. Our tech (team) are working as hard as they can to fix the issue. I'll update as soon as it is resolved, I'll update," just after 12pm.
Dozens of users had been asking the company what was wrong with their internet connections this morning.
The company was also hit by an outage last Friday, which lasted about one hour.

Hiccup holds up texts

Delayed text messages have been irritating users either side of the Vodafone/Telecom divide, with the problem blamed on a server glitch.
Texts from Telecom to Vodafone mobiles have been delayed by up to 24 hours during the past two days.
Users reported texts that had been sent yesterday finally coming through in the early hours of this morning, waking them up in the middle of the night and causing communication confusion.
Vodafone spokesman Paul Brislen said problem was with the server between the two companies, which had only been passing on half the messages it received.
Mr Brislen said the problem began at 1am yesterday.
He was unsure what caused the glitch, but was confident it had been fixed.
"We rebooted the link and the backlog should have been all cleared up by 5am," Mr Brislen said.
"It's all working very nicely now.
Mr Brislen said he had received limited complaints from users despite hundreds of messages complaining about the delays aimed at the company's Twitter account.
Telecom spokesman Ian Bonnar told Hawke's Bay Today there had been a problem "with the two networks talking to each other".

[]