Mweb under fire
Mweb customers continue to report difficulty getting support from the Webafrica-owned ISP, weeks after a large-scale email migration caused widespread disruption earlier this year.
MyBroadband was recently contacted by a reader whose Mweb email had stopped working, leaving them unable to send or receive messages through their account.
According to the customer, he was among many still experiencing problems, and they suspected it was linked to Mweb’s email platform migration. However, their issue turned out to be entirely different.
After he was unable to get through on any of Mweb’s support channels, he emailed MyBroadband. We forwarded the customer’s report as an example of several we had seen or received in recent weeks.
Webafrica chief technology officer Alan Kirton said the issue was unrelated to the email migration and was instead an isolated account problem.
“The case that was shared with us was an isolated account issue linked to a recent service change,” Kirton stated.
He explained that the mailbox was a bundled email account associated with the customer’s service, and a change to that service had affected the account status.
“The mailbox itself continued to receive email and the customer’s access has since been restored,” Kirton said, confirming the investigation found no link to the migration.
While Webafrica resolved the issue once MyBroadband intervened, the reader’s experience highlights a recurring complaint.
Many Mweb and Webafrica customers have reported that getting meaningful support from the ISP without external escalation is extremely difficult.
This reader was one of several Mweb customers who contacted MyBroadband about support problems in recent weeks, reflecting a pattern of complaints that has persisted for months.
Online reports on platforms including the MyBroadband forum, Hellopeter, and Facebook suggest that complaints about slow and unresponsive support from Mweb have been building for months.
Ongoing support complaints
Customers have been voicing frustration with the ISP’s support since its email platform migration earlier this year, which brought the issue into sharp focus.
Mweb controls several of South Africa’s most widely-used legacy email domains, including icon.co.za and mweb.co.za itself, making reliable access to these accounts critical for long-standing customers.
The migration involved more than 300,000 customer mailboxes being moved to a new platform, a process Webafrica initially promised would cause minimal disruption to services.
During that migration, customers reported that live chat would log them out after an hour of waiting, forcing them to rejoin the queue, while phone support involved waits of over 90 minutes.
Kirton acknowledged that the migration had put pressure on support capacity but said the process was now complete and volumes were returning to normal.
He said they were not seeing evidence of any broader service issue impacting Mweb email customers beyond the isolated case MyBroadband had raised.
Expanding support capacity
Kirton said supporting customers remained a key priority for Webafrica and that the company was taking steps to address the demand on its support team.
“With continued growth across the business, we are expanding our support team by over 50 agents to further improve response times,” he stated.
He said the expansion was aimed at ensuring Webafrica continues delivering the level of service its customers expect and deserve.
The planned hiring comes after Webafrica shut down Mweb’s physical offices last year and moved to a fully work-from-home model for its support operations.
Kirton has previously denied that the shift to remote work has affected support quality, stating that the model is supported by established management practices, quality monitoring, and performance measurement.
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