Around 4,000 homes are still without running water in Northern Ireland as engineers battle to repair pipes which burst in the recent big freeze.
About 12,000 other properties are on a rotating supply, which means that one hour they have it and the next they do not.
Officials from the province's water company have promised to fix most of the remaining leaks within days.
Padraic White, chairman of Northern Ireland Water (NIW), promised locals they would see a "gradual improvement" to the situation over the next few days.
"Reservoirs are gradually refilling," he said, adding that the situation was better in the north and west but reservoirs in Belfast were still in "the most precarious position".
Customers will remain on a rotation system - where their water is periodically switched off - until the middle of the week, Mr White said.
By then, he expects all but the most remote households to be connected again.
Regional Development Minister Conor Murphy said an independent probe would examine the causes of the crisis.
But he insisted that restoring water supplies to homes and businesses was the first priority.
Arctic weather conditions, followed by a sudden thaw, caused large numbers of burst pipes in buildings and in the mains supply.
This meant unprecedented amounts of water were drained from the system.
Mr Murphy said: "On behalf of the Executive and this department, I want to apologise to people for the abysmal response there has been to real problems and distress that people have faced over the last week.
"We have a crisis currently ongoing, we have a lot of people facing very severe hardship and distress.
"The focus and the priority was to deal with that issue and that means that we need to shore up, to encourage, to challenge the people who are tasked with delivering that service to do it properly."
Scotland has already provided 120,000 bottles of water while the UK government has offered to provide extra call centre staff, water tankers and engineers.
Northern Ireland's political leaders have denounced NIW as "shambolic" and vowed to hold its executives to account.
NIW has pointed to years of underinvestment in the supply network and blamed much of the leakage on private property owners not checking their premises.
NIW chief executive Laurence MacKenzie has ignored calls to resign, saying he is focused on restoring supplies and the relief effort.
Story From SkyNews.Com
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