Telkom hit by massive internet outage

A massive network outage has hit Telkom. Technicians are investigating the cause (Tero Vesalainen/Getty Images)

Telkom is investigating the cause of a massive service interruption affecting the company’s internet and phone call services on Monday. The network is now restored and Telkom is giving its customers a 1GB data token to apologise for the inconvenience.

From 13:40 on Monday afternoon, a huge volume of network issue reports at Telkom had been submitted on the network outage detection site Downdetector.

At the height of the outage, over 8 000 network outage reports were submitted about Telkom. Forty percent of the complaints have been about internet problems, 36% have been about phone problems, and 24% of people are reporting a total service blackout. 

"Sorry for the service interruption. Our network team is busy investigating," Telkom said in response to a user complaining on social media platform X at 14:40.

In a statement sent to News24 just after 16:00, Telkom confirmed that the outage had been resolved.

"The network is now restored, but some parts of the network are still synchronising and we expect the entire network to be fully online in an hour. Our technical teams are investigating the cause of outage," the Telkom statement said.

Telkom is giving its customers a 1GB data token valid for two days as a token to customers following the disruption.

There was also currently an elevated volume of outage reports on other networks and platforms such as Vodacom and MTN, but by far the greatest volume was on the Telkom network.

Telkom has not confirmed the cause of the outage, but there was another significant outage across many internet service providers on the afternoon of 12 May, after two subsea cables on the east coast of the continent reported faults at the same time. The scale of the damage to the cables is not known.

READ | Not again: SA internet disruption caused by new cable fault days after old ones fixed 

The damage to the east coast cables came just days after the last of the cables that were damaged on the west coast of the continent at the beginning of March had been repaired.

There were widespread internet outages on almost every internet service provider platform when four cables snapped on the west coast at the same time - seemingly due to seismic activity.

The article has been updated with comment from Telkom indicating that the issue was resolved and that customers would receive the voucher.