MyBroadband reportd that “a SAT-3 cable break had caused international connectivity problems for numerous Internet users in South Africa.  According to a SAIX network notice a problem – caused by a major SAT-3 cable break – on the London-Bellville link at 02:51 today caused slow international connectivity.”

“Telkom issued an official statement: “In preparation for planned work by the Sat-3 consortium, customers were informed that there would be a 4 to 6 hour downtime today. However, while this preparatory work was being conducted between Accra and Abijan, failure in the branching units resulted in a longer than anticipated downtime.”

While many users have reported being unaffected by the breakage, others report general internet instability, with disconnect and time out errors being common when browsing international websites.

Although the majority of complaints have come from international browsers, some gamers report high latencies on locally hosted servers for games like Call of Duty 5, with latency reportedly rising from sub 100ms to around 400ms.

CTO of TENET Andrew Alston wrote on MyBroadband that the regular data carrier SAT-3 has been down for a few days. In the meantime traffic has been routed through the SAFE cable and onto the SEMEWE – 3 cable. According to an unnamed source, a breakage on the SEMEWE-3 cable is what is now causing problems.

Reports have been inconsistent, with some users of both IS and SAIX bandwidth reporting problems, while others have had no trouble.

Gamers have reported high latencies on European World of Warcraft servers, which is expected given the nature of the breakage. It is unclear why local servers are reportedly being affected.