We have been experiencing erratic connectivity to International sites since about 4AM this morning. This is having a number of adverse effects on things at Rhodes. The most noticable impact is that at times users will be unable to browse web sites outside of South Africa. It is also affecting traffic to South African sites with domain names that don't end in .za -- this is because the root DNS servers are periodically unreachable. This in turn is having an effect on outgoing e-mail since we're not able to validate e-mail addresses.
This problem affects all higher educational institutions in South Africa, not just Rhodes.
Telkom/SAIX are aware of the problem but so far have been unable to find the cause of it. They assure us that their technicians are working on it and will continue to do so until they resolve the issue.