Internet has been restored in Wellington after a Chorus fault sent 90% of the network down.

A Chorus spokesperson said that one of its “core ethernet routers” serving the Wellington region experienced a temporary outage.

“All impacted services are now back online.

“Chorus sincerely apologises for the inconvenience caused and are investigating the root issue.”

Earlier, Downdetector showed a big spike in outages at Spark, One NZ, Skinny, and 2Degrees, with others.

A rough estimate from the Chrous site is that 8500 customers were affected.

A spokesperson for Spark confirmed there was a Chorus fault affecting broadband services across all telecommunications providers in the Wellington region.

“Spark apologises for the inconvenience this is causing customers. We are working with Chorus to ensure this issue is resolved as quickly as possible.”

Chorus told Voyager Internet it has identified the source of the issue and is working on a fix.

The issue is affecting multiple service providers in Wellington, Kāpiti, Hutt Valley, Palmerston North and through to Napier.

Bicycle Junction owner Dan Mikkelsen said the fault was not affecting his central Wellington business too much right now, but it would if it were not fixed soon.

He said his business was “getting by” because it had a mobile Eftpos machine, but felt for others who could not rely on that.

Mikkelsen said he’d had no communication on when the fault might be fixed and was worried it truly might be 24 hours.

There are numerous reports on social media of internet outages around the country. Photo / Downdetector

Wellington broadband company WombatNet said it was “currently observing what appears to be a major fibre outage affecting multiple areas across the region”.

“This includes customers in both Upper Hutt and the Kāpiti Coast, and notably impacts not only WombatNet users but also customers on other providers – indicating that the issue is likely upstream.”

The company said it did not know what was causing the outage and was waiting on confirmation from “upstream providers or infrastructure partners”, but was actively investigating and monitoring the situation.