Breaks in Internet connectivity, experienced on a number of networks since this morning, may be ongoing until next week Thursday.
A number of ADSL providers have reported problems since about 5am this morning, with international browsing, e-mail, streaming, downloads and other services that call for bandwidth to be routed internationally being affected.
While rumours of a break in SA's primary connection sources, including Seacom and SAT3, did the rounds, Telkom confirmed there is no cable break on SAT3.
“A planned maintenance event is, however, in progress on the Europe-India-Gateway (EIG) cable between Portugal and Gibraltar. Traffic from cables landing in Portugal and extended via EIG to London or Europe will be impacted by the EIG maintenance intervention.”
Telkom says the EIG cable outage will last until Sunday, with several ongoing interruptions expected thereafter, until completion on 5 July.
“Telkom's global network has sufficient redundancy to ensure ongoing connectivity for its users, latency will increase for some services and a small degree of congestion may result.”
At 5:26am, WebAfrica posted a notice on its forum apologising for what the company termed “international connectivity outage”.
WebAfrica said the outage would affect international browsing, e-mail, streaming, gaming, downloads and any other services routed internationally.
This afternoon, following a new update from the company's service sources, WebAfrica CEO Tim Wyatt-Gunning said he had been informed the problem did not lie with SAT3. He says it was confirmed to him that the backhaul provider, EIG, had “an issue on its cable system”.
“If it was planned, it is odd that we were not informed and I have spoken to other Internet service providers, which were not informed either. I have also been told that a ship has been dispatched and that services would be restored by 6pm.”
In the meantime, says Wyatt-Gunning, WebAfrica has rerouted its traffic via standby upstream options and the company hopes to have about 80% of services restored within the next couple of hours.
He says WebAfrica has bought additional bandwidth, for the period of a week, from another provider.
Internet Solutions (IS) confirmed connectivity issues being experienced today could be traced to undersea cable maintenance.
Mark Hamburger, business development manager of connectivity at IS, says the maintenance has impacted the service of an upstream provider. “We can confirm that all priority services are unaffected by the maintenance. Non-priority services, however, may be experiencing slower than usual connectivity rates.”
As the issue resides on an undersea cable, local infrastructure and services all remain intact, says Hamburger.
“The maintenance, expected to be complete on 1 July 2012, has affected connectivity in India, the UK, Africa, and Europe.”
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