Mweb international connectivity downtime

Outage affecting Mweb’s international bandwidth; cause being investigated

Jan Vermeulen

March 29, 2012

Earlier today (29 March 2012), Mweb users began reporting that they were unable to browse to international sites or connect to international services.

The browsing problems seem to be intermittent, and Mweb has confirmed that the issue is being caused by an international bandwidth outage.

We are currently experiencing an international bandwidth outage and are operating on failover capacity so you will experience slow and potentially intermittent browsing on international sites and other international services will be affected. Our engineers are working urgently to isolate the cause and we will update you on the situation as soon as possible.

Mweb ISP boss Derek Hershaw said that they aren’t picking up problems with the Seacom cable itself and that there appear to be multiple breaks on the cables they use to pick up the capacity at Teraco in Isando.

“We’re still waiting on exact confirmation but it looks like most of the capacity should be restored within the next 30 minutes,” Hershaw said.

In the meantime, Hershaw said that Mweb is able to route some priority traffic over its SAT–3 capacity.

“Protocols like P2P have obviously been completely deprioritised for now,” Hershaw said.