noticeboard.ru.ac.za

At around 5AM this morning, the University lost access to the Internet for reasons unknown. Users will likely experience this as an ERR_DNS_FAIL or ERR_CONNECT_FAIL error when trying to access websites hosted off campus.

The cause of the outage is currently not known, but is a fault somewhere on our upstream service provider's network. TENET's service desk are aware of the fault, and are currently investigating.

IS/TENET have just informed me that the cause of this outage is a fibre break on Neotel's network somewhere between Cape Town and Durban. As a result, this outage is affecting a number of TENET sites in the Eastern & Western Cape, and Kwazulu Natal. We're told that Neotel has been aware of the problem for some time, and they're currently on-site and working to resolve it. They were not able to offer an estimated time-to-repair.

Apparently there's a second fibre break between Kimberley and Cape Town. This is preventing Neotel from re-routing traffic around the outage that's directly affecting us. Whilst they're still unable to give us an estimated time-to-repair, I am informed that Neotel have escalated the matter internally and are devoting more resources to resolving it.

Looking at TENET's international traffic graphs for Cape Town, it seems as if this outage is affecting the vast majority of TENET sites serviced via Cape Town.

TENET's service manager has just informed me that the outage is likely to take several hours to repair completely. Whilst it seems as if Internet access has been restored now, we're warned that it is likely to be unstable or intermittent over the next few hours. I suspect that it we will probably experience further outages during the course of today as repair work progresses.