Eircom has apologised for the inconvenience caused by a major outage on its network today.

Mobile and landline services for some businesses - as well as ISDN lines - went down just after 10 o'clock this morning.

In a statement this evening, the company said the outage only affected 5% of its daily call volumes, and that 999 and 112 calls were not impacted.

Services are now said to have stabilised, and engineers are continuing efforts to fully resolve the issue.

Director of Corporate Affairs at Eircom Paul Bradley says they are sorry for the inconvenience caused to customers:

Customers with ISDN lines were not able make outgoing calls as a result of the outage.

While calls from eMobile or the Meteor network to some numbers - including '1800' numbers - received a message saying they could not connect the call.

The company added that the "intermittent issue" affected some businesses which use '1800' and '1500' numbers.

Eircom said that standard fixed line numbers were unaffected.

This issue has also affected calls into their customer care centres. However people can log a fault or report any issue here.

Gas Networks Ireland said it was aware of the fault, and that it may affect customers using the 1850 20 50 50 number to report gas escapes.

It says its temporary gas emergency numbers are: 087-9160-734 or 087-9160-701.

Dublin Fire Brigade had also warned customers may not be able to contact them using an Eircom landline.

Fianna Fáil's Communications spokesman Michael Moynihan says it is important to know why the issues occured: