Powertel Outage slows down internet in Zimbabwe, Techzim affected

Since yesterday morning, we noticed traffic on the Techzim local site wasn’t replicating to the International mirror. Experience has taught us that when this happens it means our webhost, Webdev, doesn’t have International internet.

Webdev, like all Internet companies in Zimbabwe relies on the PowerTel fibre link for international bandwidth. So, when the PowerTel’s fibre is down, Zim’s internet slows down. Internet Service Providers then have to reroute all internet traffic to through the expensive and slower satellite links.

The cable went down today. We’re told there was a breakage between Bulawayo and Plumtree and that PowerTel technicians were working on it. We have written to PowerTel to get an official comment on this. We’ll post it here when we get it.

For us here at Techzim, really it just sucks. We dread the possibility of someone coming to the site for news and finding us offline. And today, it happened to a lot of people. In fact international visitors are getting are still getting a blank page.

We really hope more players bringing in international fibre bandwidth will change this. It has to change.