At 6.17pm last night, Telecom issued a statement saying its XT mobile network was back up and running.

The network had been down, for all customers south of Taupo, since around 4.30am.

Some of the 100,000 affected customers were still unable to use their cellphones, or found service was intermittent.

Telecom said this was, in part, because some of its cell sites became overloaded as customers rushed to make calls at once as it came back online.

Later, the telco said that customers still unable to get a signal should turn off their phone, remove its battery, wait several seconds, then restart.

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