Hundreds of reports of services outages have been clocked this afternoon as some New Zealanders faced issues connecting to the internet. 

Slingshot and Orcon, both owned by Vocus Group, said via Twitter this afternoon that network issues had affected broadband services. 

By 2.30pm, the providers said services had started to come back online but asked those who were still offline to be patient as it could take some time for systems to catch up. 

The companies' call centres were facing an influx of calls and could be unreachable. 

At the peak, technology failure website Downdetector had received 945 outage reports for Orcon at 1.41pm and 627 reports by 1.58pm relating to Slingshot. 

A live map showing showed the reported outage issues for Orcon and Slingshot spanned across the country from Auckland to Dunedin, and including Hamilton, Wellington and Christchurch. 

Technology outage reports had also been sent to Downdetector for a number of other service providers, including Spark (273), Vodafone (241) and Vocus Communications (217), this afternoon - however it was unclear if these related solely to internet services.