Five hundred houses near Port Chalmers were without internet and mobile phone access for almost 24 hours following a Chorus fibre cut.
The cut affected Spark network customers and left households without coverage from about 3pm on Monday to 2pm yesterday.
Alistair Reid, of Port Chalmers, said during the outage his phone displayed a message which said it could only be used in emergencies.
''When I did get through to Spark, they had a message about another issue but they hadn't bothered to have any information about this outage.''
He was disappointed in the ''lack of information'' offered to customers. Another customer, who did not want to be named, said the outage was a ''very frustrating experience''.
''They wouldn't even admit there was anything wrong.''
The customer said they had not been offered any compensation.
''No-one is answerable, no-one says 'gosh, we are sorry'.''
Yet if you are one day late with paying your account, they whack you with a late fee.''
Chorus spokesman Nathan Beaumont said the outage was caused by a fibre fault.
''The outage affected about 500 households.
''We're still investigating exactly what caused the outage.''
A Spark spokeswoman originally said the outage affected ''a small number'' of customers (280).
The network encouraged people to have back-up plans in the case of outages.
''While our network performs well for a vast majority of the time, the reality is nobody is able to guarantee 100% reliability of network services.
''For this reason, we encourage business owners to have continuity plans so they can continue operating in the event of a natural disaster or network failure,'' the spokeswoman said.
She did not respond whether customers would be compensated.
