CORRECTION
According to Ralph Berndt, sales and marketing director at Syrex, the cause of the outage was not an undersea cable break, but a peering break from Seacom to Syrex.
"Seacom scheduled an upgrade and downtime with us for Sunday morning between 01:00 and 04:00," Berndt told ITWeb this afternon. "This upgrade of their Juniper Core Switch caused a major break between our network and theirs. Seacom was unable to resolve the issue yesterday and Syrex was forced to push a specific subnet range that was affected via another failover route we have. We are still experiencing this issue, but Seacom and Syrex are working to resolve the issue."
SA suffered an Internet outage
SA suffered an Internet outage from 8pm last night until it was restored around 8am this morning.
According to Internet service provider (ISP) Syrex, the outage was caused by a fault on the Seacom cable. The ISP notes there were routing problems experienced at the sub-marine cable. It adds Seacom was making some upgrades that resulted on the blackout. Connectivity has so far been restored.
Seacom was unable to provide ITWeb with information about the latest outage at the time of publishing. It is not clear how many people were affected.
In January, the undersea cable operator experienced outages which disrupted Internet connectivity in SA as the Seacom cable links the country to East Africa and Europe. Seacom blamed civil construction activity in Egypt for the multiple outages which left most of Africa without Internet connectivity.
To exacerbate the problem, the West Africa Cable System, which Seacom uses as backup, went down at the same time, leaving most African countries without connectivity.
The Seacom network uses bundled backhaul, open access points of presence and global partnerships to provide end-to-end wholesale connectivity around the world for African network operators.
Seacom's submarine and terrestrial networks stretch across 17 000km, connecting Africa to Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
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