Telkom network suffers national outage
Telkom suffered a national network outage on Saturday, affecting mobile voice, SMS, and data services. This included fixed LTE services sold through third-party Internet service providers.
As subscribers began reporting problems on social media, Afrihost, Mweb, and Vox published network status notices based on feedback from Telkom.
“Vox Notice: Telkom LTE Services. National. Some customers may experience problems with no connectivity. Fault has been escalated to Telkom for investigation. Further feedback to follow,” Vox said at 12:08.
“We are aware that some of our customers are experiencing network issues, and we’re truly sorry for the disruption,” Telkom said in a message posted at 13:35.
“Our team is already on it and working swiftly to get you back online. Thank you for your patience, we’ll keep you updated.”
Just before 15:00, Telkom published a notice stating that its services had been restored. It advised impacted customer to reboot their devices to reconnect to the network.
Mweb officially marked the outage as resolved for its Telkom fixed LTE customers at 21:31 on Saturday, after Telkom issued a statement explaining that major cable breaks caused the downtime.
“Telkom confirms that mobile voice and data services, which were disrupted earlier on Saturday due to major cable breaks, have now been fully restored nationwide,” it said.
“Our technical teams acted with urgency to identify and repair the affected infrastructure, and services have since stabilised and are operating normally.”
Telkom said it was committed to strengthening network resilience. “Measures are being reviewed and reinforced to reduce the likelihood of similar disruptions in the future,” it said.
“We sincerely apologise to our customers for the inconvenience caused during the outage and thank them for their patience and understanding while restoration efforts were underway.”
The chart below from Downdetector shows that subscriber complaints started after 10:30 on Saturday and peaked at around 12:45.
May outages
This was not the first time that Telkom experienced network disruptions this year due to a cable break. At the end of May, Telkom had a significant outage in parts of the Western Cape.
This mainly seemed to impact its Internet service provider operations, chiefly affecting fibre broadband customers.
Reports for fibre network operators Openserve and Vumatel also spiked around the same time. However, all indications were that only Telkom Internet service provider customers were affected.
Fibre network operator Frogfoot told one customer from the Western Cape region that only Telkom users were experiencing problems in the area.
A Telkom spokesperson confirmed to MyBroadband at the time that it suffered an outage due to a cable break incident.
Telkom’s downtime was the latest of several significant Internet outages in South Africa during May.
Internet service provider Cybersmart suffered an extended outage earlier in the month when several of its core routers failed due to a sudden surge in global routing data.
Cybersmart still had a few old Cisco 6500 routers in its network, which the network equipment vendor had stopped manufacturing in 2015.
On 21 May, Vodacom experienced a network outage due to a power fault in a Midrand data centre. The outage prevented customers from making calls and accessing the Internet for nearly two hours.
Details about what caused the power fault have not been released. The issue could have been caused by many things, including a Vodacom misconfiguration or a problem with the data centre’s redundant power feeds.
Also on 21 May, two incidents briefly interrupted data traffic for many Internet service providers (ISPs) at South Africa’s largest Internet exchange point, NAPAfrica.
The downtime happened because of a software bug in a piece of networking equipment that prevented it from responding correctly to a flood of traffic from a remote network.
NAPAfrica said the particular issue that caused the flood of traffic not to be handled correctly was previously logged with its vendor and has been acknowledged as an official bug.
“The recommendation from the vendor was to use port protection mode to prevent port flapping and to ensure that leaks would not affect the network,” it said.
“In this particular case, protection mode has proven to be ineffective, resulting in the same issues related to the aforementioned bug.”
To mitigate this issue, NAPAfrica said it has begun implementing static access control lists to ensure stability.
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