Gen-i's CEO Chris Quin is claiming that XT mobile services affected by today's outage are functioning and that the majority of services have been restored.

In correspondence obtained by Telecommunications Review, Quin claims that the technical teams “have identified the cause of the fault and the majority of services have been restored to clients. We will continue to monitor the situation and will keep you updated. We believe that XT mobile services are now functioning normally again.

The email – the fourth to be sent to corporate customers today - explains how the outage occurred:

“From approximately 4.30am today we experienced an unplanned reset due to hardware failure in our Christchurch XT Mobile switch which resulted in the majority of XT cell sites between Taupo and the bottom of the South Island not operating.

As a result, XT users in these regions have not been able to use XT services, including voice, SMS, and mobile broadband during this time.

We are now working on restoring the services that run over the XT network.

Until service is restored, Telecom recommends that any XT customer experiencing issues attempting to contact emergency services on their mobile, should immediately use a landline instead.

XT services north of Taupo, and CDMA services nationwide, have not been affected.