Mon, 15 Jul 2013 12:28:58 +0200
At about 11:20AM the University lost access to the IPv6 Internet. The reasons for this are as yet unknown, but it appears to be a problem on TENET's Grahamstown point of presence. The IPv4 Internet is still reachable.
You'll likely experience this outage as slow responses from IPv6-enabled web sites (which now includes many of the major content providers, such as Google, Facebook, etc), as your browser fails over from IPv6 to IPv4. You will not be able to reach any IPv6-only sites (such as ipv6.google.com).
The problem has been reported to TENET's service desk.
Mon, 15 Jul 2013 12:35:00 +0200
This problem now seems to have extended to the IPv4 Internet as well. Whilst not as bad as the IPv6 problem, large portions of the IPv4 Internet are not reachable at the moment.
TENET's service desk has been appraised of the changed status.
Mon, 15 Jul 2013 12:49:04 +0200
The Telkom optical network network equipment that connects SANReN's Grahamstown PoP to the rest of the network is currently reporting an alarm. We've advised TENET of this, and they've reported the matter to Telkom.
Mon, 15 Jul 2013 15:17:51 +0200
The latest feedback we've had is that Telkom are trying to isolate a fault on their network that's causing intermittent connectivity out of Grahamstown. There is currently no estimated time to restore.
This doesn't explain the total IPv6 outage, since IPv4 & IPv6 utilise the same physical links. We've asked TENET for more feedback on this.
Mon, 15 Jul 2013 16:32:28 +0200
Telkom are currently on site in our data centre, and have swapped the fibre optic pair connecting SANReN's Grahamstown PoP to their Huntley St exchange.
Mon, 15 Jul 2013 16:45:23 +0200
Telkom are still running tests, so whilst connectivity might be temporarily restored, you can expect it to be unstable.
Because of the way our connection has been flapping, once the connection is properly restored it might take several hours before all parts of the Internet are again reachable.
Mon, 15 Jul 2013 17:20:39 +0200
Telkom have moved the affected links to a different fibre optic pair, and Internet access has been restored as a result. They've said that they'll continue to investigate why the original fibre optic pair failed.