Technical problems at Macquarie kill NSW Web sites

The data hosting service, which also affected ZDNet Australia's  Web site, went down at 8.30am and was unavailable until around midday. After that time there was only an intermittent service.

At around 12.30pm the company's customers received a text message telling them the service had improved.

"Co-location Internet performance has improved, intermittent problems possible," the text message said.

One hour later customers received another text message:

"Internet intermittent performance problem re-occurring," the new message said.

Michael Robin, customer operations manager at Macquarie told ZDNet Australia on Friday morning that he did not have any information on what was causing the problems or how long it would take to repair.

"I do not know what is actually occurring but our engineers are working on it. I do apologise it is taking them some time to get it up but I am waiting for the manager - who is looking after the engineers - to give me an update," said Robin.

According to Robin the fault affected all of the NSW area.

"A whole range of customers are affected. It is the whole of NSW and a lot of our customers go through the same pipe," said Robin.

At 3pm, a Macquarie spokesperson told ZDNet Australia  that the fault had been repaired.

"They have identified the fact that some of the collocation customers were affected - those customers that come in and out via the Internet, which is less than 10 percent.

"It wasn't the data customers so it wasn't anything to do with DSL, frame relay or IP VPN. They are still working on exactly what the route cause was. That is still being investigated," the spokesperson said.

According to Macquarie's sales literature, the company's customers "typically fall within Australia's top 10,000 enterprises and government departments/agencies" and its services are used by more than 750,000 people every day.