South Island and lower North hit by hours-long mobile and internet outage as Rural Connectivity Group towers fail

A widespread mobile and broadband outage knocked out internet and phone services across the entire South Island, Stewart Island and large parts of the lower North Island on Friday morning, leaving One NZ and 2degrees customers without coverage for hours and forcing the Automobile Association to close every one of its branches in the affected regions.

The disruption began overnight and was still rolling through Wellington and Christchurch — the two cities reportedly hit hardest — well into the morning. One NZ traced the problem to about 90 cell sites operated by the Rural Connectivity Group, a joint venture set up by Spark, One NZ and 2degrees in 2017 to build mobile infrastructure in places the three networks would not have reached on commercial terms alone. When the RCG sites went down, anyone whose phone or fixed-wireless connection was riding on one of those towers — including a chunk of customers across all three carriers — lost service.

In a public statement on Friday morning, One NZ said it was “aware of an issue affecting some of our cell sites and internet across the Lower North Island and the South Island”, and that “our teams are working hard to get everything back up and running as quickly as possible”. The company opened up wider access to its satellite service, telling customers they could “still stay connected using WhatsApp calling, messaging, and data through its satellite service” while the towers remained offline. 2degrees, which uses RCG infrastructure for parts of its rural reach, also reported customers were affected. Spark said its core network was running normally.

The AA confirmed that every centre across the lower North Island and the whole of the South Island closed for the morning, leaving members unable to renew licences, register vehicles or process other in-person transactions until the lines came back. “We’re working closely with local teams to manage this and will reopen services as soon as it’s practical to do so,” the AA said in a statement.

The disruption hit small businesses hardest. Craven Coetzee, manager of Wellington IT services firm IT NEAR U, told RNZ his phones started ringing at first light. He said he had taken about 15 customer calls in the morning alone, and that those customers were “very frustrated, they can’t work”. Many of them depend on cloud-hosted accounting and point-of-sale systems that simply do not function without an internet connection.

Carey Griffiths, a Hutt Valley resident, was among the many people who initially assumed the problem was at their end. He told reporters he had spent time troubleshooting his own router and equipment before realising the issue was network-wide, and was annoyed that the carrier had not pushed out a clearer message about what was happening. That experience was a common one, with social media on Friday morning filling up with people swapping notes about whether the trouble was on their end or somewhere upstream.

The Rural Connectivity Group, which sits at the centre of this outage, is the unsung backbone of mobile coverage in regional New Zealand. Since it was established under government contracts to extend rural mobile coverage, RCG has put up hundreds of cell sites along state highways and in small towns where Spark, One NZ and 2degrees would otherwise have left coverage gaps. Those sites are shared, meaning that one fault at the RCG layer can take down all three carriers in a given area at once. Friday’s failure shows what happens when that shared layer goes wrong.

For customers in the regions, the outage was a sharp reminder that mobile coverage out of the main centres often relies on a single chain of equipment. A farm in inland Otago that lost its signal at breakfast on Friday probably did not have a backup tower from a competing carrier to fall back on — because the next nearest tower is, very likely, the same one. The Commerce Commission and successive ministers for communications have sometimes argued that this kind of shared infrastructure delivers better coverage at lower cost than three separate networks competing in thin markets, and that is broadly true. The trade-off is that when a fault hits the shared equipment, no one gets an alternative.

Some customers reported their service coming back from around 10am, with One NZ and 2degrees both indicating engineers were working through the affected sites in stages. By late morning the picture was patchy — some towers back online, others still struggling — and full restoration timing had not been confirmed. Both carriers suggested customers turn aeroplane mode on and off to re-register on the network once their local site recovered, but warned that some areas would lag behind others.

The outage will likely revive a long-running debate about the resilience of New Zealand’s telecommunications backbone, particularly in the regions that depend most heavily on a single shared site for coverage. Banks, EFTPOS terminals, healthcare systems and emergency-service paging all run on top of the same handful of mobile networks, and a failure that shuts down a regional AA office this morning could just as easily have shut down something more critical at a worse moment.

Were you caught up in the outage on Friday morning, and did you find a workaround? Tell us in the comments below.