On Tuesday 5 December 2017 Zimbabwe experienced a huge internet outage that affected most of the country.
Techzim reached out to various sources in the industry to establish what really happened and have an appreciation of things. Below are the details we have so far.
At around 11:44 AM, a tractor that was ploughing a field in the Limpopo province in South Africa apparently cut through some fibre owned by one of Liquid Telecom Zimbabwe’s suppliers. The supplier is either Neotel (which the Liquid group owns) or Broadband Infraco, a South African state-own backhaul internet provider.
Once alerted to the problem, the Liquid Telecom supplier (we’re not too sure which of the two it may be) sent out a team to locate the cable break and at around 17:17 PM connectivity was restored.
Liquid is by far the largest internet provider in Zimbabwe having 81.4% market share of equipped international internet bandwidth.
At about the same time, coincidentally, TelOne, the second largest internet provider in Zimbabwe, also experienced a fibre cable failure on their Botswana link. According to a statement by TelOne, this link is a backup link for when their main link is down.
TelOne also set out to fix this fault, however, even with that restored, they were operating with half the capacity they normally have, so the internet was quite slow.
According to information we have, the fix by Liquid Telecom was a temporary solution just to restore some connectivity. The team on the ground will apparently work through the night in order to restore full connectivity.
As Liquid Telecom supplies a number of local Internet Providers in the country, their going down had a domino effect on connectivity in the country, essentially causing a large portion of the country’s internet to go down.
Mobile operators were not spared. The largest mobile internet provider, Econet Wireless, was affected the most. NetOne was also affected, albeit briefly. It’s not clear how much Telecel, the smallest mobile internet provider (7.6% market share) was impacted, but some subscribers have said it was much slower than usual.
The resultant overall downtime in the country reflected the dependency on the Liquid/Econet group.
Essentially the only international capacity Zimbabwe had today was that by Dandemutande, Powertel, Africom (together providing about 4% of the internet in Zimbabwe) and TelOne (providing about 7.5% due to the outage).
Statements have been issued by Econet and TelOne thus far. Techzim has reached out to Liquid Telecom Zimbabwe for an official statement and a response is yet to come. We are particularly curious how Liquid was not able to reroute Zim traffic through its other fibre links coming into Zimbabwe like that from East Africa through Zambia.
Attempts to contact Broadband Infraco via the telephone numbers were fruitless at the time of publishing.
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23 comments
A tractor plough damaged the fibre cable?
That soinds a bit dar fetched as I am quite sure Liquid are quite aware of these possibilities and should have sunk the fibre links deep enough for this not to happen?
It’s a joke if they haven’t, though find that a bit hard to believe.
A tractor plough damaged the fibre cable?
That soinds a bit far fetched as I am quite sure Liquid are quite aware of these possibilities and should have sunk the fibre links deep enough for this not to happen?
It’s a joke if they haven’t, though find that a bit hard to believe.
Guys get your facts right, NetOne was down too and came back at 5:00 pm
they all use the liquid link for data
Is this the reason we had outages in SA also? Sounds strange though. The outage was around the same times also
“At about the same time, coincidentally, TelOne, the second largest internet provider in Zimbabwe, also experienced a fibre cable failure on their Botswana link.” sounds dubious I think.
And techzim speaks of a tractor ploughing the fibre cables…..your research today sounds like it was done by retards
True story
retards!, hahaha i like that !!
Why doesn’t Liquid also go through Mozambique as well like TelOne? These guys obviously should have protection that goes via different routes. After all, it’s a fault and it does happen.
where does powertel get its internet from,,seems to have been connected all day
Techzim should research on who owns the biggest backhaul in zim!!!! And dont rush when you dont have your facts right
Im in Johanesburg and I did notice slower speeds as well on the fibre network at work. A 600mb download which usually takes 1 minute had only downloaded 60mb in 4 minutes so I knew something was awry
2 links go down on the same day around the same time . . . .
Yeah it definitely sounds like a coincidence – I agree with you techzim this is just Zim’s bad luck
Was it a tractor ploughing or road construction…my TelOne was up and running all day long. They were routing from a server in Lusaka.
AnaTechZim get your facts right then publish your story. There was no coincidence in Telone links going down. We know what happened isu varimo muIndustry macho. Ini zii semunhu arikuziva zvakaitika
True story
This is believable. The ZOL/Liquid switch box that connects the block on Mazowe and Chinamano runs through my back yard. The guys laid the cable trunking so shoddily over my durawall I have had to use duck tape to patch up exposed areas. Also, the “switch box” where everybody in the block connects to was left unsecured I have had to use wire to lock it up…kids were beginning to get curious about it
Has anyone out there ever heard about “Business Continuity Planning”?
Highly suspocious that two links are not working at the same time. Someone is not telling the truth
Disgusting that at this time we effectively have a monopoly supplying Internet connectivity! No wonder the entire country’s internet is so poor. WAKE UP PEOPLE
What is the need for giving the market share for telecel as it was the one affected. This sounds as if this story was written by a liquid representative.
This points to incompetence by whoever is supplying internet services to Zimbabwe, why can’t they have a backup link for situations like this? This is utter rubbish totally unacceptable, poor planning and business acumen.