Vodacom went down in South Africa — what happened

Vodacom experienced a network outage on Wednesday night, preventing customers from making calls and accessing the Internet.

Based on data from Downdetector, the issues started around 17:00 and were resolved by 19:00.

“Okes, is there a problem with Vodacom or its just me? I have no network whatsoever?” one customer reported on Twitter/X.

“I’m all the way in Lesotho and I’ve been having trouble since 5 pm,” said another.

Vodacom started responding to customers from around 17:30, saying “some customers are currently experiencing intermittent connectivity issues.”

Asked what happened, a Vodacom spokesperson explained that a power fault at a data centre in Midrand caused the outage.

“We experienced an outage that impacted some customers using services such as voice, data, charging, and enterprise services,” Vodacom said.

“This was due to a power fault at a data centre in Midrand. Our technical teams attended to the problem immediately, and services were restored as quickly as possible.”

Details about what caused the power fault were not available by the time of publication.

The issue could have been caused by many things, including a misconfiguration by Vodacom, or a problem with the data centre’s redundant power feeds.

Vodacom’s downtime was the second major outage impacting South African businesses and consumers on 21 May 2025.

Earlier in the day, a flood of traffic from a remote network that was not properly handled due to an equipment vendor’s software bug took down NAPAfrica twice for brief periods.

The first incident happened around 12:15, and the second happened two hours later.

NAPAfrica, an initiative from data centre provider Teraco, is South Africa’s biggest Internet exchange point operator.

According to feedback from industry sources, the outage impacted most Internet service providers in South Africa as they are all heavily reliant on NAPAfrica.

NAPAfrica said the particular issue that caused the flood of traffic not to be handled correctly was previously logged with its vendor and has been acknowledged as an official bug.

“The recommendation from the vendor was to use port protection mode to prevent port flapping and to ensure that leaks would not affect the network,” it said.

“In this particular case, protection mode has proven to be ineffective, resulting in the same issues related to the aforementioned bug.”

To mitigate this issue, NAPAfrica said it has begun implementing static access control lists to ensure stability.

Vodacom’s outage occurred long after NAPAfrica had resolved the issue on its network.

The graph below shows the Downdetector outage tracking for Vodacom during the past 24 hours, which indicates a surge between 17:00 and 19:00.