Shortly before 8AM this morning the University lost access to the commodity Internet. Sites that are part of the national research and education network (i.e. other universities) remain reachable, as do a few sites within South Africa. Users will likely experience these outages as an ERR_DNS_FAIL or ERR_CONNECT_FAIL error when trying to access websites on the commodity Internet.
This outage is unrelated to the scheduled work that Dark Fibre Africa undertook last night.
The problem appears to be that both of SANReN's circuits into Durban (from Port Elizabeth and from Pretoria) have failed, rendering the Durban node (and hence SEACOM) unreachable. (This is a repeat of the situation that occurred on 1 January, and affects all universities, not just Rhodes.) Telkom are aware of the fault and are currently investigating. No estimated time-to-repair has been given.