Multiple National Long Distance (NLD) fibre routes have gone offline between major South African cities, impacting the country’s largest fibre network operators and Internet service providers (ISPs).

Outage-tracking platform Downdetector showed that the problems began around 16:15, with Metrofibre, Frogfoot, and Openserve affected.

It also showed an increase in reports of problems at Afrihost and Vox around the same time, but this was likely related to the fibre outages.

Afrihost, South Africa’s largest independent ISP, posted on its website that Metrofibre and Frogfoot had notified them of a network outage affecting the Eastern and Northern Cape.

“Affected clients will experience no connectivity. MetroFibre and Frogfoot engineers are working on resolving this issue as soon as possible. We sincerely apologise for any inconvenience caused,” it said.

While Metrofibre and Frogfoot were experiencing severe outages in the Eastern and Northern Cape, other customers were also affected.

According to reports given to ISPs, NLD cables of Frogfoot and Liquid Intelligent Technologies were impacted. A technician told ISPs that five cables were offline.

MyBroadband readers from all over the country were reporting poor performance on their fibre connections.

An industry source told MyBroadband that ISPs saw NLD 4 go down first, followed by NLD 5 a bit later. This created pressure on ISPs as their remaining NLD capacity struggled to cope.

The South African National Research Network (SANReN) status map showed several NLDs offline on Monday, including Durban–Cape Town and Johannesburg–Mtunzini routes.

An unrelated outage was also impacting Octotel customers in the Plettenberg Bay, Somerset West, and Overberg regions. Vumatel customers in Bellville have also been hit by an outage.

Downdetector showed that problem reports began to subside from 18:20, although it was unclear whether this was due to redundancies kicking in or to the fibre outages being resolved.

At 18:20, SANReN’s status map still showed links as offline on the Johannesburg–Cape Town, Durban–Cape Town, Johannesburg–Mtunzini, and Johannesburg–Bloemfontein–KuGompo routes.

Source: My Broadband