noticeboard.ru.ac.za

The University appears to have had intermittent international Internet access since about 1.30PM this afternoon. The reasons for this haven't yet been formally communicated to us, but they appear to be a continuation of the SEACOM problems experienced earlier in the week -- the current issue has bee reported in the media.

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.

We currently don't have any idea of the expected time to resolution.

All indications are that this is another terrestrial outage on the SEA-ME-WE4 cable passing through Egypt (SEACOM use SEA-ME-WE4 to get from Mubai to London).

Note that because of the security situation in Egypt, if the problem is not resolved by (the rapidly approaching) sunset, it is unlikely to be resolved before 8AM tomorrow morning. This is because the Egyptian military enforce a curfew from dusk to dawn.

Apparently Telecom Egypt have had a technician on-site for about the last hour, and are working on splicing the broken fibre. We're also told that the curfew in that particular part of Egypt is only effective from midnight, which means there's a good chance this will be fixed today (and hopefully in the next few hours).

Estimated time to repair is in about two and half hours time.