There has been a break on the WACS (West Africa Cable System) undersea cable which is affecting Internet connectivity in South Africa.<\/p>\n
According to a\u00a0post by TENET<\/strong><\/a>, the operating partner of the South African national research and education network, WACS capacity dropped at 23:28 last night.<\/p>\n This will have an impact on South African Internet users, as was the case with the recent WACS and SAT3\/WASC\u00a0cable system breaks.<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n \u201cWith the WACS and continued SAT-3 outages on the east coast, SANREN users working from home during the lockdown may experience issues if their home providers do not have sufficient capacity via alternate sub-sea cable systems,\u201d said TENET.<\/p>\n It said the WACS break is due to a \u201ccomplete cable cut on segment 4 at 39.0175Km from SV8 Cable Landing Station\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cWaiting for confirmation whether SV8 CLS is on the UK or Portugal side or whether this is a terrestrial versus sub-sea break,\u201d it said.<\/p>\n High impact event<\/strong><\/p>\n Afrihost has already acknowledged the cable break as a \u201chigh impact\u201d event on its status page.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are aware that there is currently problems with international traffic. This is due to problems on the cables we make use of to send and receive international traffic,\u201d said Afrihost.<\/p>\n \u201cThis problem is causing increased latency and slow speeds when accessing international servers and data. Engineers are attending to the problem and hope to have it resolved soon.\u201d<\/p>\n The last time South Africa was affected by a major cable break was in January, which also involved the WACS international link going down.<\/p>\n This affected customers of numerous South African ISPs.<\/p>\n The impact of a cable break on local Internet service providers depends on their capacity on other cable systems, such as EASSy and Seacom.<\/p>\n If an ISP has sufficient capacity on all the cable systems which land in South Africa \u2013 WACS, EASSy, SAT3, SAFE, and Seacom \u2013 the impact of a cable break will be minimal.<\/p>\n If an ISP relies solely on WACS for international connectivity, the impact of this break can be severe.<\/p>\n This article originally appeared on MyBroadband<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n
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