This morning, at around 11:30 AM Liquid Telecom Zimbabwe, an Econet Wireless Zimbabwe subsidiary had a major fibre outage that affected the bulk of Zimbabwe’s internet users.
As at the time of writing, Liquid, ZOL, Econet are down, while NetOne, which probably was riding on Liquid at the time of the outage was momentarily down as well. It would appear that NetOne, on noticing the dropping of internet switched to a backup link in order to continue offering their customers access to the internet.
Telecel and TelOne were not affected, or if so, it was not experienced at the Techzim office.
The outage was a big deal because of the amount of users that ride on Liquid Telecom, over 75% when looking at just Econet alone. According to the POTRAZ Industry Performance Report for Quarter 2 2017 Liquid Telecoms Zimbabwe carries 81.4% market share of equipped international internet bandwidth.
When contacted ZOL Customer Care stated that they are experiencing service interrupts due to a “core platform failure” and their engineers are working flat out to rectify the problem.
What has caused the problem is still unclear, however, Techzim will update you as soon as we are aware. At this point in time it does not seem like it is politically motivated.
If internet is/was down for you, do advise where you were trying to access the internet from and using what type of a connection? How long were you down for? How much of an inconvenience was this for you?
19 comments
But why
My Aptics connection (now Part of Dandemutande) slowed down to a crawl around 12 probably because of rerouted traffic as various providers sought to mitigate the downtime. Has improved now but this is nowhere near what I am used to. Seems to be intermittent at the moment. As all those oversold redundant links are claimed.
There is no relationship between Aptics and Dandemutande.
Dandemutande is humming.
Aptics routes its traffic via Yo!Africa (Dandemutande) so yes they have a relationship.
2.19 still experiencing some problems.
no internet on my phone since 11:30am. Its 2:25pm now and still nothing. Hope this gets rectified soonest, so inconveniencing!
Major fibre breakage on Neotel network Luis Trichardt which incidentally carries the bulk of Zimbabwean traffic. Incident caused by road construction works. Neotel engineers working on site at the moment to restore service.
That’s the message I got from my account manager at Liquid.
it seems TelOne are using a link from Zambia (Vodafone), that’s why they managed to stay up, but not everywhere. Some ISP has said its a breakage at Luis Trichardt.
Telecel is working just Fine
Net1 is now back online. My zol is still down though. 3:45pm
Powertel working well not affected at all
Telone was also down even called the customer care line and they indicated as such it is back up now but its up and down
telone n netone were also down in bulawayo. restored as of now
I use ZOL, Harare CBD.. went down around just before 12 this morning,… only to come up a few mins ago (around 17:30)
Netone WiFi on a very slow speed.12kbs/s.
17:38 Plumtree- Telone stil down fro around 12pm
Netone had probs since 5am bt bad around 4
Econet dwn fro around 12 bad around 4
These companies should wear masks so we know they are bandits
Telone went down from 1pm to around 6pm yesterday in Bulawayo. When I called they said they had a major fault with the line between chegutu and harare.
PaZimbabwe is reporting (somewhat speculatively) that the shutdown was intentional: https://www.pazimbabwe.com/zimbabwe-43508-president-mnangagwa-led-zimbabwe-military-junta-caused-tuesday-internet-blackout.html