About 500,000 Sky digital customers across New Zealand and Australia are without the service tonight, due to a satellite problem.

The Radio Network listeners from Otago to Auckland are also reporting outages.

Sky spokesman Tony O'Brien says the problem lies with an outage on the OptusB1 satellite that provides the Sky signal.

He says the signal was lost following a routine positioning procedure by Optus, but the satellite is now communicating correctly with Optus ground stations.

He says Optus is currently doing a re-pointing manoeuvre, which should be completed by about midnight.

Tony O'Brien says updates will be on the Sky website.

He says the New Zealand Cricket Awards are now being shown on the Sky UHF channel.