Joburg south residents plunged into internet outage after fibre cable breaks

Residents from the south of Joburg have been left without internet connectivity after a fibre cable broke, disrupting services.

The internet outage was reported on Tuesday afternoon.

Several areas including Lenasia, Lenasia South and other surrounding areas have been affected by the outage.

The downtime has affected people working from home and home-based businesses who rely on an internet connection.

Many have taken to social media to express their anger and frustration at what has become a recurring problem.

Repairs

Openserve, which provides fibre connection to a number of service providers told a resident, it was aware of the problem.

“Openserve is aware of a cable break affecting several services in and around your area. Repairs are underway. We are aiming to have your service repaired today. Apologies for the disruption caused by this outage,” it said.

There is no indication of when services would be restored.

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Cables breaks

In August, South Africans experienced slow internet connectivity after two undersea communication cables that are critical for network operators in the country broke.

A rock fall in the Congo Canyon on Sunday caused the breaks in WACS and the South Atlantic 3 (SAT–3) undersea cables.

These are crucial for connecting South Africa to the rest of the African continent and Europe.

The disruption affected online services including video streaming platforms like TikTok, YouTube, Netflix, and Disney+ among others.

While, the WACS cable is incredibly important for South Africa’s internet operations, there is plenty of additional capacity on the east coast in the form of Seacom, including Google’s recently launch Equiano cable and the Facebook-backed 2Africa cables, which completely dwarfs the WACS cable.

The greatest impact of the cable break was felt during the “Netflix Hour”, which is between the hours of 6pm and 10pm at night.

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