Fibre network operator MetroFibre was on Friday hit by a widespread network outage, disrupting services for numerous fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) customers in at least four provinces of South Africa.

Reports flooded in from affected users indicated the outage commenced between 5.30am and 6am on Friday morning.

According to monitoring on Downdetector, a platform tracking service interruptions, customers began experiencing connectivity issues within MetroFibre's network during the early hours of the morning.

By 7.01am, Internet service provider (ISP) Afrihost alerted its customers via its fibre network status portal, acknowledging the outage's high impact across the country. Afrihost categorised the outage as “High impact”.

“Metrofibre has informed us of a network outage affecting Gauteng, Mpumalanga, North West and Limpopo. Affected clients will experience no Internet connection,” the notice read.

Afrihost assured its users that MetroFibre was actively addressing the issue and apologised for any inconvenience caused.

In a statement on its website, Metrofibre said: “We are currently experiencing a major outage affecting service on our network due to a power equipment failure on our equipment at Teraco Isando. Our engineers are working on it. We will keep you posted.”

Meanwhile, Vox, another major ISP, also reported disruptions in various areas, including KwaZulu-Natal, not initially mentioned in the FNO's communication to ISPs.

At this stage, it remains uncertain if these outages were related to the larger, multi-province incident.

At present, MetroFibre is undergoing assessments to determine the extent of affected customers and is actively working to rectify the situation with on-site technicians.

The outage underscores the challenges faced by critical infrastructure providers and the ripple effects such outages have on end-users and service providers alike.

This is a developing story.

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