S.Africa: Johannesburg: Our Internet is down… because of Black Vandals…

This will give you an idea of how things run in South Africa. This is part of an email I got today explaining why there is an Internet outage further south of me in Johannesburg:

Mon, Mar 27, 3:29 PM (9 hours ago)

We have been advised by one of our Fibre operators that we use for our Core network as well as end nodes to certain customers that DFA (xxxxxx Fibre Africa) has had sabotage to their network.

Vandals accessed one of their manholes and physically cut 19 cables, affecting both 144- and 72-core cables. This could mean that 2,746 fibre strands might potentially be severed, which has a severe impact on the network performance.

To this extent, our main Fibre node for JHB South is currently offline and traffic is being rerouted via other nodes.

The back-haul is under strain due to this and slowness may be experienced during this period.