NATIONAL NEWS - South Africa has been hit with a large Internet outage affecting thousands of users across the country. Four of the nine subsea cables that connect South Africa to the world are currently damaged.

On 14 March, three cables on the west coast of the continent snapped simultaneously, Microsoft confirmed on Thursday afternoon.

Multiple outages on undersea cables near Abidjan in Côte d’Ivoire are causing downtime. The West Africa Cable System (WACS), the Africa Coast to Europe (ACE), MainOne, and SAT3 cables are affected.

The break wreaked havoc on a host of platforms on Thursday. 

Outage tracker Downdetector showed a big spike in reports of issues on websites, apps, and network providers that offer data services.

Many Vodacom customers have also reported that their mobile data was down in several parts of the country. MyBroadband confirmed this with tests in Gauteng and the Western Cape. Vodacom’s voice network was working.

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