The government has launched an investigation in the failure of some emergency 111 calls in Auckland this morning.

According to a statement from ICT Minister Steven Joyce a fault occurred at Telecom’s Papatoetoe exchange at around 3.30am, which resulted in some 111 calls not getting through. This morning’s fault is not related to recent failures in Telecom’s XT network.

“I spoke to Telecom CEO Paul Reynolds this morning and agreed that officials from both the Ministry of Economic Development and the Police will be involved in this investigation,” says Joyce.

The Ministry of Economic Development will be closely involved in the review and the Ministry are appointing an independent technical expert to ensure that Government is fully confident that all issues are identified. “I am determined to get to the bottom of what happened because public confidence in accessing emergency services must be retained,” says Joyce.

The investigation will include whether the Police were told of the fault “in a timely manner”, as well as looking at the root causes and why back-up and call diversion systems didn’t work.

Earlier this week Minister Joyce threatened to regulate the priority of 111 calls if mobile networks become unstable, following the fourth outage to Telecom’s XT network.