At about 11PM last night, all South African higher educational institutions lost access to the international Internet.
You will likely experience this outage as an ERR_DNS_FAIL or ERR_CONNECT_FAIL error when trying to access websites hosted outside South Africa (even those ending in .za). When accessing secure (https://) web sites, your browser may report that the connection has timed out or the site is unreachable.
The reason for the outage is a fault on the SEACOM submarine fibre optic cable. SEACOM have indicated that there is a break in the terrestrial portion of the cable going through Egypt. Due to the security situation in Egypt, SEACOM indicated that they weren't able to dispatch a technician to the site until daylight. Work should have commenced on the break at around 6AM, and is expected to take a couple of hours to complete.