Discovery hit by another outage
Medical aid titan Discovery experienced its second IT-related system outage in a week on Sunday, 12 October 2025.
Customers reported online that the Discovery app and website did not work. Users trying to access their Discovery Miles also encountered errors.
Outage tracker Downdetector showed a sharp rise in problem reports at around 10:30. Discovery confirmed the issue at 12:30.
“We are experiencing intermittent issues on our claims system, affecting pharmacy and hospital connections,” it said.
“We’re working tirelessly to resolve the issue ASAP and apologise for any inconvenience caused. Stay tuned for updates!”
This comes after Discovery’s online platforms for its medical aid and insurance services suffered an outage on Monday, 6 October 2025. As before, the Discovery Bank website and app do not appear to be impacted.
Discovery is not the only company to have experienced major disruptions to their online services in the past two weeks.
The Courier Guy’s website was offline on Tuesday, 30 September, while Mweb experienced an outage of its email services on Thursday, 2 October.
According to The Courier Guy, the website outage did not disrupt its services. It also provided customers with alternative methods to book collections while communicating with them about the downtime.
Mweb said its outage was limited to email access via POP/IMAP and the webmail portal due to an issue at its upstream vendor.
Mweb was also not the only communications service provider that experienced a service outage in the past month. Telkom’s mobile network suffered a national outage at the end of September.
Earlier in September, Afrihost and MetroFibre reported high-impact fibre connectivity outages affecting customers around the country.
Internet outages in South Africa
At the end of May, Telkom had a significant outage in parts of the Western Cape. This mainly seemed to impact its Internet service provider operations, chiefly affecting fibre broadband customers.
Also in May, Internet service provider Cybersmart suffered an extended outage when several of its core routers failed due to a sudden surge in global routing data.
Cybersmart still had a few old Cisco 6500 routers in its network, which the network equipment vendor had stopped manufacturing in 2015.
On 21 May, Vodacom experienced a network outage due to a power fault in a Midrand data centre. The outage prevented customers from making calls and accessing the Internet for nearly two hours.
Also on 21 May, two incidents briefly interrupted data traffic for many Internet service providers (ISPs) at South Africa’s largest Internet exchange point, NAPAfrica.
The downtime happened because of a software bug in a piece of networking equipment that prevented it from responding correctly to a flood of traffic from a remote network.
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.
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