A major network failure has hit Telkom. Engineers are investigating the cause. (Tero Vesalainen/Getty Images)
Telkom is investigating the cause of a major service disruption that affected its internet and calling services on Monday. The network has now been restored and Telkom apologizes to customers for the inconvenience and is offering 1 GB of data tokens.
Starting at 13:40 on Monday, a large number of network problem reports at Telkom were sent to network outage detection site Downdetector.
At the height of the outage, more than 8,000 network outage reports were filed for Telkom. 40% of complaints are about internet issues, 36% are about phone issues, and 24% of people report a complete outage.
Telkom responded to user complaints on social media platform X at 2:40 p.m., saying: “We apologize for the service interruption. Our network team is busy investigating.”
Telkom confirmed in a statement sent to News24 shortly after 4pm that the outage had been resolved.
“The network is currently back up, but parts of the network are still syncing and we expect the entire network to be fully online within the hour. Our technical team is investigating the cause of the outage. “There are,” Telkom's statement said.
Telkom is offering a 1GB data token valid for two days as a token to customers following the disruption.
There were currently a large number of outage reports on other networks and platforms such as Vodacom and MTN, but by far the largest volume was on the Telkom network.
Telkom has not confirmed the cause of the outage, but many internet service providers experienced another major outage on the afternoon of May 12 after two submarine cables on the continent's east coast reported failures at the same time. Occurred. The extent of damage to the cable is unknown.
Read | New cable failures will no longer cause SA Internet interruptions days after the old cable has been fixed
The damage to the east coast cable occurred just days after the last cable damaged on the continent's west coast was repaired in early March.
When four cables snapped simultaneously on the West Coast, nearly all internet service provider platforms experienced widespread internet outages (likely due to seismic activity).
This article has been updated with comment from Telkom stating that the issue has been resolved and customers will receive their vouchers.
