Vodafone has apologised to customers for a software malfunction that wiped out the internet connection to its customers nationwide.
Photo: 123RF
In a half hour window from 10.22am, data, home internet and eftpos services stopped working for thousands of Vodafone customers.
Calls and texting services were unaffected.
Vodafone technology director Tony Baird said the malfunction was caused by two pieces of software restarting.
"We haven't had anything like that for years, we're in contact with the vendor of the piece of software and they've got all the logs we took," he said.
Mr Baird said extra staff would be monitoring the situation over the weekend.
"We're looking at what we can do to make sure that software doesn't have that fault again."
He said everything seemed to be back to normal, but Vodafone was checking on businesses who would not have been open over the weekend.
"I would just like to apologise to all our customers for these issues, a big apology," he said.