Breaks in undersea cables slows South Africa’s internet to a crawl

A number of internet service providers (ISPs) across South Africa are currently experiencing intermittent access to international sites.

Afrihost, Axxess and WebAfrica all confirmed on their status pages on Friday that users will experience “major” disruptions today, especially those trying to access international sites.

According to Afrihost, its upstream provider has noted breaks in the SAT3 and WACS undersea cables off the coast of Gabon are the prime suspects.

WebAfrica warns that these breaks will cause increased latency and packet loss — longer load times and more page loading errors.

The breaks are affecting ADSL, fixed wireless, hosting and fibre services.

There’s currently no estimated time of recovery.

The service disruption comes after a number of ISPs were hit by DDoS attacks late in 2019, which also slowed internet access to a crawl for many across South Africa.

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