South Africa emitted a communal sigh on Friday morning when a broken Seacom cable link caused a near-nationwide internet slowdown.
South Africa emitted a communal sigh on Friday morning when a broken Seacom cable link caused a near-nationwide internet slowdown.
Not all internet service providers (ISPs) in the country were affected, but those that were had had little or no international connectivity for the whole weekend.
MWEB, one of the biggest ISPs affected by the outage, rerouted traffic on their network to alternative ISPs, but browsing has been slow or impossible. They have warned their members in all areas about degraded internet browsing, email and other internet services due to the link failure.
"Seacom has confirmed multiple undersea breaks off the coast of Egypt and are working on providing alternative bandwidth," MWEB wrote on their network status notice page.
Seacom, a sub-marine cable operator with a network of high-speed fibre-optic cables, provides the East and West coasts of Africa with ADSL internet.
"Seacom has identified restoration solutions and providers and is in the process of re-configuring the network and services to restore circuits," the company said on its website.
"Definitive timing is not yet available, however we are targeting restoration within 12 hours or less. Communications to customers on their specific requirements are under way."
At the time of going to print on Monday, usable international connectivity still had not been restored.
