At about 5.30PM this evening all South African higher educational institutions lost access to the international Internet as a result of an outage on the SEACOM submarine fibre optic cable.
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.
Since the last SEACOM outage, TENET has entered into a contract with another provide for restoration capacity on the SAT-3 fibre optic cable. As a result of the way this contract is negotiated, there is a mandatory two-hour notice period before this restoration capacity becomes available. Notice was given as soon as SEACOM failed, and thus we expect that international access will be restored via the alternate route by about 7.40PM (unless SEACON resolves the problem sooner).
Unfortunately the restoration capacity does not yet provide IPv6 services. This means that international sites on the IPv6 Internet will remain unreachable until SEACOM is restored. It is planned to include IPv6 services in future, and testing for this will occur on Wednesday.