Telecom still maintains that its massive broadband outage over the weekend did not last 24 hours, the trigger point for automatic compensation under the company's standard broadband terms and conditions.

However, Telecom exclusively tells NBR that it is willing to pay compensation regardless.

The catch is that the company is not making a blanket offer. Rather, the company will make a call on a case by case basis, says Telecom spokeswoman Katherine Murphy. Those affected should contact Telecom Broadband's help desk, says Ms Murphy. The level of compo, in cash or credit, would depend on each customer's circumstance.

Public apology
Telecom has already spent some cash reacting to the outage, but it's gone not to customers but to a series of advertisements that ran in the NZ Herald, DominionPost and Christchurch Press apologising for the outage with a personal message from CEO Paul Reynolds.

While vague and feel-good, Mr Reynolds message regardless hints at service problems that last more than a few hours as he writes "Telecom people worked tierelessly over the weenedn to get all services up and running again."

Two hours' shy
The outage began around 9pm on Friday evening when a still-undiagnosed, catastrophic fault hit Telecom's central Auckland exchange, knocking out all broadband access for the company's customers.

Between 4am and 5am on Saturday morning, basic broadband connectivity was restored, but some services, such as email, were not restored until much later in the day.

Ms Murphy says Telecom can't give an exact time all service was restored, but that it estimates around 6pm - two hours' shy of the compulsory compo point.

Asked why many NBR readers did not see email sent until 10pm or later, Ms Murphy pointed to the fact that DSL modems usually needed to be restarted at the customer's end to be reset after an outage. Sometimes it took customers a while to reboot their systems.

Inside the outage
NBR's original coverage of the fault drew a barrage of comments. The most colourful came from someone who claimed to work at the epicentre of the fault:

"I work for Telecom, in the building that was the cause of the problem.

"I was working at the time the outage happened, and I tell you, it sucked.

"Before you all complain about not being able to 'get through to a human', think about the humans that are working when stuff like this happens.

"Every single Telecom broadband customer was affected. [But] so were all of telecom's broadband staff. We are people too.

"The article states that 'some of the internal systems went down'. It was pretty much EVERY internal system we use."

NBR feels for the correspondent and encourages him, or her, to claim compo from his employer, along with every affected customer.