A massive internet outage hit South Africa and the Ivory Coast on Thursday, with internet users throughout the country reporting slow speeds or unresponsive pages.

A Vodacom spokesperson told News24 that multiple subsea cable failures between South Africa and Europe were impacting network providers, including Vodacom.

“This means that certain customers are currently experiencing intermittent connectivity issues,” the spokesperson said.

Network monitoring site Downdetector showed a huge increase in outage reports across many of the biggest network platforms in the country, starting from around 12:30.

By 15:00 the volume of outage reports on Downdetector for some platforms, including Microsoft, Vodacom and MTN, and WhatsApp had decreased from the highs experienced at around 13:30.

Here is a list of some of the companies with significant outage reports on Downdetector.

• Microsoft
• Google
• MTN
• Vodacom
• Openserve
• X
• WhatsApp
• Afrihost
• Cell C
• Various banking platforms

News24 understands that the West African Cable System is one of the cables now affected.

Subsea cable company Seacom reported multiple cable breaks in the Red Sea late in February. The breaks allegedly happened after the anchor of a sunken ship in the region dragged through the cables.

News24 understands that the current outages have been caused by further breaks, the cause of which is not yet known.

Johannesburg and Cape Town have been assigned “rerouted” status on Cloudflare, one of the biggest networks on the internet.

Microsoft Azure placed a status update on its site warning customers of network issues on the continent. The company said it was investigating the issue.

“Customers using Azure Services in South Africa north and South Africa west may experience increased network latency or packet drops when accessing their resources, degradation and availability issues.”

The Vodacom spokesperson said the matter was being attended to.

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