National outage at large South African Internet service provider
Internet service provider Cool Ideas experienced a nationwide outage on Tuesday morning, with customers across the country reporting no connectivity on its fibre lines.
Cool Ideas subscribers on Openserve, Vumatel, and Metrofibre reported that their connections were completely offline from around 07:00 on 5 May 2026.
Downdetector showed that customers began reporting problems at 06:55. In the MyBroadband forum, a Cool Ideas representative said, “We are aware the team are on it.”
The Internet service provider also acknowledged the outage on its network status page. “Cool Ideas technicians are currently investigating. There is no ETR at the moment,” it stated.
In 2019, when Cool Ideas experienced a major outage like this, it was the victim of distributed denial-of-service attacks.
In that case, it took a few weeks for the ISP to build up its defences to protect its infrastructure and effectively repel such attacks.
Contacted for comment, Cool Ideas said that the outage was related to an upgrade and network configuration error.
“The impact was picked up at about 07:04, with most of the network restored around 07:44. We will provide an RFO once everything is restored.”
Downdetector outage reports for Cool Ideas on 5 May 2026
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