Seacom issue causing Internet problems in South Africa

[Hanno Labuschagne]

Seacom issue causing Internet problems in South Africa

Several Internet users in South Africa have reported connectivity issues believed to be due to an IP transit problem on a major long-distance fibre infrastructure operator.

Online service outage tracking platform Downdetector showed a big increase in reports indicating problems on Seacom from around 10:30 on Tuesday, 4 November 2025.

 

[Death]

Made for a fun Tuesday...

 

[dontcryforme]

Was this why MBB was inaccessible for about 15 minutes? The CloudFlare issue?

But to more serious matters, is onlyfans affected?

 

[werny]

Thank god for our failover OpenServe fibre line at the office, our primary ISP is basically unusable.

 

[Death]

Thank god for our failover OpenServe fibre line at the office, our primary ISP is basically unusable.

Internet wise, I didn't actually feel it. But stuff for work at Teraco CPT, was properly DOA.

 

[$m@Rt@$$]

Imagine my morning when Cloudflare is used as primary public DNS and Google my secondary

 

[Bad Ballie]

I have tested multiple local South African sites, including MyBroadband, my bank’s online services, and several client service portals, and consistently receive “site not found” / connection failures when accessing them directly.

However, I have full access and high-speed connectivity to all of these services when connected via my VPN.

Based on my understanding (which I am open to correction on), if the fault were solely related to an international submarine cable issue (e.g. SEACOM), this would primarily affect international traffic. Local South African traffic should continue to route via local peering and exchange infrastructure (NAPAfrica, JINX, CINX, and private peering links), which would not normally be impacted by an international transit fault.

Given that local services are also unreachable without a VPN, this suggests a local routing, peering, or upstream transit issue at ISP level rather than a purely international cable fault.