Customers across Otago are among those complaining about nationwide glitches in Spark and 2degrees' cellphone services.
The rolling problems have caused some text messages to arrive hours, or even days, late, while other messages from known contacts arrived as though they were sent from unknown numbers.
The glitches prompted a flood of social media complaints yesterday, including more than 1000 posts on the Otago Daily Times Facebook page.
Most pointed the finger at Spark and 2degrees. Melissa Purnell said texts to her phone were coming through ''hours'' after they were sent, while Karyn Churcher said messages from her children and husband were arriving as if from unknown numbers.
Kay Pearson, a Spark customer, said the problems had been happening ''all week'' and were ''very frustrating''.
Kellie Donovan, another Spark customer, said she recently received five texts in one morning, all sent to her the previous night.
''Lucky it wasn't urgent!''
2degrees did not respond to a request for comment yesterday, but tweeted it was aware of an issue ''on Spark's side that's affecting texts on all networks''.
A Spark spokeswoman said the glitches were being investigated, but appeared to be two separate issues.
A ''number configuration issue'' meant texts were still going through, but with sender numbers presented incorrectly.
''As a result, that number is not being recognised by the user's address book,'' she said.
''The issue appears to be intermittent and it isn't concentrated on one particular location ... It's all over.''
The fault was believed to have followed a planned software upgrade on Saturday, and technicians were working to resolve it ''as quickly as possible''.
She could not say when that might happen, but apologised to customers affected by the problems.
The delayed arrival of text messages seemed to be a separate issue shared by Spark and 2degrees, and was still being investigated, she said.
