© UnsplashWorking from home and home schooling came to an abrupt halt for some internet users on Friday.
Vocus owns the Orcon, Slingshot and Stuff Fibre internet brands and also provides the internet infrastructure for Sky Broadband which was also impacted.
The problems began shortly after 1pm, but appear to have been resolved at about 2pm.
Vocus NZ initially reported that its network had been impacted by a denial of service (DDos) attack.
But chief executive Mark Callander later clarified that it was not its own network but a customer that had been attacked.
Vocus NZ implemented measures to protect the customer, which in such cases generally involves filtering out traffic bombarding the attack victim.
But that process had not gone as it should, instead impacting its own service to other customers.
Callander said Vocus used a popular product from United States firm Arbor Networks to defend customers from denial of service attacks.
"We put a mitigation rule on that platform to block the attack on the customer.
"Based on our initial investigation it was this change that triggered the disruption," he said.
Vocus would be going back to Arbor to understand what had occurred, he said.
The protection measures it put in place should not have had the effect they did, he said.
"Clearly this wasn't great timing with most of the country working from home and we'd like to apologise for the interruption."
Denial of service attacks, also called DDos attacks, involve attackers bombarding an online service with spurious requests to connect, in order to overload them.
They do not require hacking into an organisation's computer systems.
Such attacks are usually conducted for profit, with attackers demanding a ransom in order to cease their activities.
Attacks on large organisations, including internet providers, are usually difficult to pull off because of the capacity they have to handle traffic.
The incident came as Australian-owned Vocus continues to consider selling off its New Zealand arm through a sharemarket float.
The NZX experienced a series of significant denial of service attacks on its website last year that interrupted share market trading until it made a policy change.
It was understood to have received a significant ransom demand in Bitcoin.
Media companies and banks were also targeted at around the same time as the NZX, though it was not clear the attacks were linked.
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