• This morning Johannesburg resident in several suburbs have awoken to network outages.
• The outages appear to be affecting many of the fibre operators in the city, namely Vumatel and Evotel.
• At the time of writing, no service provider is able to advise on a return of connectivity.

Johannesburg residents have this morning awoken to a double whammy. This as loadshedding persists, currently switching between Stages 3, 4, and 5, but now connectivity appears to be an issue too. To that end, a number of internet service providers (ISPs) have alerted their customers to network outages.

In our own experience for example, Cool Ideas has been issuing alerts to customers since 06:29 AM, notifying of affected areas and which fibre providers are experiencing issues. The first alert noted that the network outages impacted, “Roodepoort, Randburg, Sandton, Midrand and multiple areas in JHB.”

This alert specifically made mentioned of Vumatel Aerial, and has since been followed by notifications for all Evotel customers, with Zoom Fibre, and Netstream also receiving alerts.

At the time of writing, said outages are still ongoing, with no further updates as to when connectivity will be restored.

Webafrica has also issued a notification to its customers explained that, “We have a confirmed widespread network issue affecting our Vumatel/ SADV & Evotel fibre users in parts of Gauteng at the moment. Further Updates to follow on our network status page,” in reply to a tweet at its official Twitter account.

Customers are advised to follow the company’s live network outages map in order to stay up to date on developments in their area.

We will continue to monitor the situation, but it looks like this Tuesday will be a frustrating one for many Johannesburg residents, many of whom are working remotely.

[Image – Photo by Simon Hurry on Unsplash]