Following a second crash in just over a month, Telecom has announced that it has restored its XT mobile network. However, some of the South Island customers are still reporting difficulties with many in Southland, Timaru and Dunedin angry over not being able to access the network at all.

The outage that has affected nearly all of the services such as phone calls, text messages and broadband services has served to further undermine the credibility of the company as a genuine telecommunications provider, as it closely followed the mid-December crash that had affected around 90,000 customers in south Taupo.

Asserting the Telecom needed to find the source of the problem and fix it immediately, Telecommunications Users Association of New Zealand chief executive Ernie Newman said, "There's a huge credibility problem opening up here. I can't remember any mobile network or any fixed line network for that matter in my time in the industry where there has been a succession of outages like this one”.

Telecom responded by saying that the December crash had been a result of a fault during maintenance in Christchurch.