At about 6PM, all South African higher educational institutions lost access to the international Internet.

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've received the following feedback from TENET:

QUOTE
Both SANReN national backbone circuits out of Durban failed a short while ago. The immediate
consequence is unavailability of international bandwidth for most institutions. The failures have
been logged with Telkom but no further information, or estimated time to fix, is yet available.