Seems like there is an upstream cable fault (being investigated) that has caused international browsing from South Africa outward to fail.
Pings reveal failing terminations on the entry points into continental Europe and the US.
IS has reported it as follows, all others are piggy-backing (or just silent on the matter): (more…)
SEACOM expects all connectivity to be restored to full pre-crash conditions by 23 July 2010. The repairs are not complete yet, but, officially, “in the final stages of completion”, with only testing to go before the cable goes back down into the water.
Finally, SEACOM has posted new (well, another) report regarding the undersea outage off Mombasa, which, though initially projected to be completed by 11 July will most probably only be finished by 22 July 2010 according to latest reports.
Finally, though, they have announced that the “designated ship has been deployed to the location of the fault where it will proceed to locate the cable on the seabed.” They say that this action will have to take place in and around the area the cabled was dropped by the installation ship over a year ago due to tidal movements that may have relocated the cable on the sea bed. “This is normal and caused by the natural sea bed movements and strong submarine currents in that area.” (more…)
Nothing much new, there is not even an operational update from SEACOM. However, unofficial reports are still pointing to 22 July 2010 as the targeted completion date forthe service to be restored for the submarine cable running up the East African coast. (more…)
Since their last update, SEACOM – via their news section or the SEACOM Blog which are ostensibly the same (sort of very weak SQL coding and gaping holes asking for SQL injection) – has not released any further news since 9 July 2010 — the target date of recovery is 22 July 2010. (more…)
There has been a flurry of updates relating to the repairs to the SEACOM cable. In short – don’t expect anything before 22 July – previous expectations of “5 – 8 days” were over-enthusiastic from the operator themselves…
While restoration capacity has successfully been sourced and implemented from other cable operators servicing the eastern and southern African regions, a lot of work lies ahead regarding the actual SEACOM cable. It appears that the exact location of the cable break, above and beyond the previously reported repeater issues, has been pinpointed at 4 700m below sea level, resulting in the need for specialised repair equipment, robotics and expertise.
The repairs, according to SEACOM, are in the hands of third-party contractors who – beyond weather and sea conditions – run on their own timeline. So the cable operators, SEACOM, have put forward 22 July as a possible next repair date. (more…)
So the site’s back, but there’s no news. No news is good news?
Please note that our News module is currently unavailable, due to a security patch implemented by Hosting – we are working on the problem and the news will be back ASAP. (more…)
Now the website, too...
The official source for SEACOM press releases, www.seacom.mu has decided to follow suit on the router off Mombasa that has decided to crash, with a very boring bog-standard JET Database error message after the “Detecting Flash” redirection:
Microsoft JET Database Engine error ’80004005′
Unspecified error
/index2.asp, line 10 (more…)
Local ISPs have been making a variety of attempts and efforts to reroute local traffic to bridge the virtual shut-down of the connectivity of those users solely dependent on the SEACOM fibre-optic cable for their Internet access.
Internet Solutions in South Africa have put in place a variety of rerouting options which, depending on the downstream ISPs, should result in improved browsing availability. Alternate international routes by IS were confirmed to be up in semi-live state yesterday late afternoon. (more…)
Slow Internet access (if any – in some cases, you can’t connect to sites without using a proxy) in South Africa… SEACOM has announced that the actual repair on the repeater in segment 9 will take only a few hours, though the full process may take at least 6 – 8 days. The ship is not out and mobilised yet. On their website, there is an update relating to the latest system failure: (more…)
New update at 5am SAST: So they have initiated the deployment of the ship to the wet plant. That does not mean, though, that the ship is actually is already on its way – it’s deployment is initiated…
Official communications from SEACOM have been promised to follow…
In addition:
SEACOM’s investigations have revealed that an offshore repeater has failed on the cable’s segment 9, to the north of Mombasa. This unexpected failure affects traffic towards both India and
Europe. Traffic within Africa is not affected.
At SEACOM.mu, they have added a news item: (more…)
One of my service providers have forwarded me an update to the latest SEACOM outage:
According to the update, SEACOM has sent out notification that they are currently localising the fault from both Mumbai and Dar-es-Salaam (in Tanzania). (more…)
Afrihost, as well as a range of other resellers of SEACOM bandwidth, again had to post notifications today of network downtime:
We are experiencing an intermittent International ADSL connectivity problem. Our upstream service providers’ engineers are investigating the cause of the problem. We will post more details here shortly once we have more information.
Services such as Instant Messenger and websites hosted overseas(google,facebook) have been affected.
From my datacentres’ notification reports, I can say that this is related to a failure on the SEACOM link in Kenya; as Afrihost’s only redundancy would be their hosting infrastructure, which their proxy is running on, they’re pointing users to http://www.afrihost.co.za/proxy.pac as the proxy solution for now.
Data centres are using other redundancy links through London and DC on a very congested local network with now high latency… (more…)
“SEACOM’s backhaul service provider link is down from Mtunzini to Johannesburg due to an unusual failure on both primary and secondary routes due to circumstances beyond our control. SEACOM is in the process of reprovisioning customers onto a tertiary route.” is what SEACOM announced today. Some ISPs confirmed that SEACOM connectivity was restored at around 15:24 SAST, though links were only stable around 16:20 SAST.
The latest notification received from SEA-ME-WE 4 indicates that the repair work on the SEA-ME-WE 4 cable is expected to be completed by 22.00 (UTC) on 28 April 2010.
That’s the update from SEACOM. MTN Business gives similar information.
An hour ago, the link was marked as back up – the stability of the link will be shown by how fast / how slow the access on the web via the SEACOM cable is again, after the last few days of slow web access and intermittant internet connectivity via rerouting…
Here’s hoping…!
An update from Afrihost which echos what’s happening to IS-resellers of DSL bandwidth in South Africa:
IS have removed ADSL users from emergency SAT3 backup and thus you will not be able to access international websites via the normal channels.
Proxying is touted here to be the solution. Full background to the story of Seacom’s emergency maintenance is here: SEACOM maintenance extended until 30 April – South African Internet slow.
MTN Business (in their NOC notices) have confirmed what SEACOM had alluded to – the maintenance windows (and hence the high latency and traffic redirection via the SAT3 cable rather than the SEACOM link) has been extended until 30 April 2010. SEACOM in their notice on 26 April:
The ongoing repair work is affecting several cable systems and has impacted negatively on the overall Internet connectivity in many regions across the Middle East, Africa and Asia, which rely to some extent on the availability of the SEA-ME-WE 4 cable for global connectivity. (more…)