Multiple National Long Distance fibre routes between Joburg and Cape Town have gone offline

[mylesillidge]

Massive Internet problems in South Africa

Multiple National Long Distance (NLD) fibre routes have gone offline between major South African cities, impacting the country's largest fibre network operators and Internet service providers (ISPs).

Outage-tracking platform Downdetector showed that the problems began around 16:15, with Metrofibre, Frogfoot, and Openserve affected.

 

[wingnut771]

How does 5 cables go offline?

A technician told ISPs that five cables were offline.

 

[WollieVerstege]

But I can still access DailyInvestor and Newsday

 

[thebigguy]

I haven't noticed anything. Maybe all dodgy sites still work

 

[Sapphiron]

How does 5 cables go offline?

From an ISP buddy, I hear, there is almost always 2 or 3 of them down.

 

[Sapphiron]

I haven't noticed anything. Maybe all dodgy sites still work

in CPT its all still good if things are CPT hosted or international.

if you are in JHB, Google and MS are still good, but your International traffic is likely poor at the moment.

 

[Sinbad]

BEE contractor with a backhoe next to the N1 near bloemfontein?

 

[airborne]

How does 5 cables go offline?

BEE contractor with a backhoe next to the N1 near bloemfontein?

Yep thats exactly what I was going to say, they found the backhoe operator outside builders and left him unsupervised on the site.
Job done!

 

[magneto]

very strange multi offline at once... hmm. design flaw/ too much infra sharing...

 

[Randomwasavailable]

Luckily we have Starlink. Oh. wait, their 100+ million dollars generosity were shown the door, but AWS's 20 million dollars exclusively black IT company offer (cadre enrichment) was approved.

VPN was also affected.

 

[airborne]

very strange multi routes offline at once... hmm. design flaw and took much infra sharing...

Thats the only fibre route, they had to put them all in the same trench

 

[wingnut771]

Yep thats exactly what I was going to say, they found the backhoe operator outside builders and left him unsupervised on the site.
Job done!

Its mad they bury all the cables in the same trench. Anti-redundancy.

 

[magneto]

Thats the only fibre route, they had to put them all in the same trench

SA NREN Logical Map

 

[Sapphiron]

Its mad they bury all the cables in the same trench. Anti-redundancy.

Trenches are expensive (for some reason), and take a long time to get approval for.

 

[Justanotherguybythesea]

Trenches are expensive (for some reason), and take a long time to get approval for.

Overhead thy are only one drunk driver away from losing it as well. Had that occur years ago, when a drunk driver, name witheld, took out the single phone pole on the corner of the slight bend in 20km of road. The entire Lowveldt lost phone and other connectivity for around a week, till Telkom could get a fiber crew there to repair the cable. No card transactions, no banking, no phone nothing, unless you were kind to the base phone operator, and she would tell you when you could dial and use the emergency phone comms systems, which gave you 6 lines connecting you to PTA, and another 6 to CT, and 6 to Durban. Luckily i knew both operators, and was able to gt lines out there no problem, though mostly for official business, but also the odd personal call after hours.

 

[darryn]

Massive Internet problems in South Africa

Multiple National Long Distance (NLD) fibre routes have gone offline between major South African cities, impacting the country's largest fibre network operators and Internet service providers (ISPs).

Outage-tracking platform Downdetector showed that the problems began around 16:15, with Metrofibre, Frogfoot, and Openserve affected.

I had some crazy latency to an EU game last night talking like 7000ms and netflix was buffering on a 500mb link so i assume not just afrihost i am with axxess and in Durban

 

[lunch]

I'm in CPT/Vumatel and my line was pretty borked last night. I just can't tell if it's the usual poor Afrihost experience on my line or as a result of this. The result is the same

 

[Bad Ballie]

Been an issue in Dirtbin since last Sunday, internet was continually connecting and disconnecting randomly from Sunday afternoon until yesterday. Now it's happening every few hours instead of every 20 to 30 minutes. no complete loss, Frogfoot show connected with all four lights green, but internet disconnects for around a minute then reconnects.

 

[Anthro]

BEE contractor with a backhoe next to the N1 near bloemfontein?

We don't call them that anymore, now we call them slay queens.

 

[wingnut771]

Been an issue in Dirtbin since last Sunday, internet was continually connecting and disconnecting randomly from Sunday afternoon until yesterday. Now it's happening every few hours instead of every 20 to 30 minutes. no complete loss, Frogfoot show connected with all four lights green, but internet disconnects for around a minute then reconnects.

My internet has been fine on AH/MFN.