PCFormat Forum Archive

Downtime on the SEACOM system has left numerous South African ADSL users without international connectivity on Thursday, 13 September.

Numerous ADSL subscribers reported slow or no international connectivity from around 14:00.

MWEB confirmed that their SEACOM bandwidth is currently down and that they are only running on WACS.

MWEB is still waiting for confirmation from SEACOM about the cause of the problem and the estimated time of when it will be fixed.

SEACOM outage on 13 September statement

SEACOM released the following statement regarding the downtime today.

SEACOM’s customers are currently experiencing a service affecting outage due to simultaneous fibre cuts on both South African backhaul providers’ networks.

SEACOM has been informed that repair crews are on site and will provide an update as soon as our circuits are up and stable.

Source

Divers caught cutting internet cable
March 28 2013 at 12:28am

Cairo - Egypt's coastguard caught three divers cutting through an undersea Internet cable on Wednesday, the army said, the first suggestion criminals might be involved in days of severed connections and disruptions online.

A patrol stopped a fishing boat near the Mediterranean port city of Alexandria and arrested three divers, the army spokesperson said on his official Facebook page.

He did not give details of the divers' possible motive in severing the link he said belonged to Egypt Telecom, the country's monopoly landline provider. (more here)

Seacom repairing damaged cables

Cable company Seacom was still working on repairing the damaged undersea cables that had disrupted internet services, a statement on its website said on Friday.

Internet service providers have been reporting cuts to their systems since March 22 and Seacom has had to re-route its disrupted lines.

International internet connectivity between Sub-Saharan Africa and Europe has largely been affected.

In the statement, posted on Thursday, Seacom said it was in the process of restoring transmission to affected customers.

“We again apologise to those customers who continue to be impacted following the further fault on the restoration system SMW4,” said Seacom.

Earlier in the week, the company confirmed it had received reports about three people arrested for cutting Seacom cables in Egypt.

Seacom said it did not believe that the initial disruptions were a sabotage operation.

“We think it is unlikely that the damage to our system was caused by sabotage. The reasons for this are the specific location, distance from shore, much greater depth, the presence of a large anchored vessel on the fault site which appears to be the cause of the damage and other characteristics of the event,” said Seacom.

The incident was still being investigated.

Seacom said full transmission would likely be restored by early April. - Sapa