noticeboard.ru.ac.za

Approximately half an hour ago the University lost all access to the Internet for reasons unknown. The fault likes beyond our border routers somewhere on Telkom's network. Telkom are currently investigating the cause of the outage and have promised to let us know once they've found it.

This fault will affect all Internet traffic except traffic that goes through the Grahamstown Internet Exchange. Connectivity within the University should be unaffected for the time being, bar some minor DNS problems in outlying areas.

Apparently there's a fault in the Kingwilliamstown exchange that's affecting Rhodes and a few other places in the Eastern Cape. Telkom don't seem to think it's a fibre optic problem (which is good news) and they tell us we can expect it to be resolved "in four to six hours".

I've got more specifics now. Apparently the problem is a 625Mbps ATM circuit between East London and Linton Grange. Either the fibre optic has been stolen or, more likely, an interface card on the Linton Grange side has blown. The circuit in question also caries some of East London's telephone traffic, so the outage is affecting telephone customers too (this is good news for us). Telkom have transmission engineers on site and will work on the problem overnight. They're attempting to re-route our traffic through another circuit in the interim.

We are experiencing intermittent outages to all internet traffic this morning.
This is probably due to changes into routing over telkom's ATM network to route us back over the fixed circuit.
It seems to have stabilised now.
We'll keep you informed of any further news.