Biggest South African network outages

Outages experienced by Telkom, MTN, and Vodacom’s networks have been listed as the top South African outages during the first three quarters of the year, according to a DownDetector report.

DownDetector is a platform that allows users to report outages of digital services such as the Internet, banks, hosting platforms, and mobile networks.

This enables users to determine whether a problem is specific to them or if others are also experiencing it.

In its report, Downdetector listed the top 10 outages experienced in Africa and the Middle East, of which five only occurred in South Africa.

The largest of these was a Telkom outage on 13 May, which 55,000 users reported.

Customers reported having no signal on the network, preventing them from accessing the Internet, calling, and sending SMSes.

Telkom confirmed that it suffered a temporary network outage affecting its services countrywide.

MTN had the second-largest outage on 25 July, reported by 33,000 users. This coincided with reports of fibre outages around the country.

Vodacom’s 14 March data network outage was the third-largest South Africa-specific outage of the year and the seventh in the Middle East and Africa, causing 20,000 Downdetector complaints.

During the outage, Vodacom subscribers around South Africa could not access the Internet for several hours following a suspected submarine landslide that knocked out four undersea cables.

However, Vodacom customers could not even access locally-hosted sites.

Microsoft’s locally-hosted Azure cloud service was similarly impacted, with companies like payment provider Yoco unable to function due to downtime.

This raised questions about how these networks were configured and why they required international Internet access for local services to keep working.

The fourth most widespread outage of a South African company was that of the country’s largest bank by customers, Capitec, which saw 17,000 reports made. Interestingly, that was the same day FNB and RMB experienced a significant outage.

Discovery came in fifth, with 13,000 reports.

The two outages listed as the most widespread across Africa and the Middle East were the Microsoft 365 outage on 14 March and the Facebook outage on 5 March.

Microsoft’s outage, also caused by the quadruple subsea cable break near Côte d’Ivoire, disrupted Azure services, Office 365 customers nationwide to complain that they could not access their cloud-hosted services.

The West Africa Cable System (WACS), the Africa Coast to Europe (ACE), MainOne, and SAT3 cables were all affected.

While the Microsoft outage specifically affected parts of Africa, the Meta Platforms outage on 5 March caused a worldwide shutdown of its Instagram and Facebook social media platforms.

Following the outage, cyber threat intelligence firm Cyberint reported that three groups — Skynet, Godzilla, and Anonymous Sudan — claimed responsibility for the attack.

The three groups said they collaborated to shut down Facebook, Threads and Instagram. However, Cyberint said it could not verify the veracity of the groups’ claims.