At about 00:45 this morning, we lost access to the vast majority of the Internet for reasons as yet unknown.
You will likely experience this outage as an ERR_DNS_FAIL or ERR_CONNECT_FAIL error when trying to access websites. When accessing secure (https://) web sites, your browser may report that the connection has timed out or the site is unreachable.
The issue appears to be a problem on the SANReN national backbone -- we can reach the Port Elizabeth and Cape Town nodes (and hence the Cape Town Internet Exchange, and the ISPs that peer there), but nothing beyond those. This problem will affect most universities in South Africa; it is not specific to Rhodes.
We're in the process of trying to contact TENET's service desk to establish an estimated time-to-repair.