DURBAN - From day 2 of the National COVID-19 lockdown, millions of South Africans have been experiencing slow internet speeds.
This is due to the breakdown of the West African Cable System (Wacs), which is an undersea cable situated between the United Kingdom and Portugal.
At the beginning of the year, South Africans also experienced slow internet when another undersea cable, the South Atlantic 3/West Africa (SAT-3/Wasc) cable, broke down.
The previous repair took two weeks due to bad weather. On Saturday night, a service ship set sail to start the repairs.
On Friday evening, several customers from various internet service providers such as Afrihost, Axxess, Cool Ideas, MWeb, and RSAWeb raised their concerns about internet speeds.
The South African National Research and Education Network (SANREN) released a statement via Twitter saying: “We are observing our WACS capacity as down since 23h28 UTC/27th March 2020. A call has been logged with our provider for feedback.
"Traffic has failed over to SEACOM and EASSy cable systems, and there is currently no impact for SA NREN traffic.
“The cut is on the cable belonging to TATA and is between Highbridge (UK) and Seixal (Portugal). Information will be imparted as it is received from TATA via our WACS service provider.”
CORONAVIRUS MONITOR