Describing it as a “one-off localised fault”, Chorus earlier said the repair work was complex because of the location and number of damaged cables.

“Our crews are working as hard as they can to ensure the impact is as short as possible,” the spokesperson said.

“We recognise how important connectivity is to people’s daily lives and appreciate everyone’s patience and understanding as we work to restore communications as quickly as possible.”

One resident affected by the outage said they didn’t feel the outage was being taken seriously.

“The outage was widespread and Chorus was made aware at 5:45am.

“They didn’t appear to do much about it until 2pm when traffic management was put in place.

“Technicians only arrived on site at 3pm.

“What I’d like to know is why it took almost 12 hours for technicians to start work?”

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