Massive Telkom Network Outage Hits South Africa, Disrupting Services Nationwide

A substantial network outage has struck Telkom, the telecommunications giant in South Africa, causing widespread disruption to its mobile services.

Reports from Downdetector.co.za, a platform that monitors network issues, indicated a surge in complaints related to Telkom’s network performance.

The outage commenced around 2pm, with the exact cause still under investigation by Telkom’s technical teams.

At this juncture, Telkom has not yet issued an official statement regarding the root cause of the outage.

Notably, Telkom’s mobile network became completely unavailable in certain areas, as confirmed by TechCentral‘s experience in Johannesburg where a Telkom SIM card showed ‘no service’.

This network downtime follows a recent event where two subsea cables encountered problems, affecting connectivity along Africa’s east coast; however, the two incidents are unlikely to be linked.

On social media, users flooded platforms with complaints about the network access issues, prompting Telkom to acknowledge a ‘national outage’.

In response to TechCentral’s inquiry, a Telkom spokesperson mentioned that the company is actively resolving the ‘temporary network outage’ affecting services countrywide.

With the network partially restored, certain segments are still synchronizing, with a full recovery expected within an hour.

As a gesture of goodwill, Telkom announced that all its customers will receive a 1GB mobile data credit valid for two days as an apology for the inconvenience caused.