Undersea cable fault cuts Utande off

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Updated below

People have been complaining about Utande this morning, apparently it’s been slower than a nineties dial-up.

According to ITWeb, this problem might take a while to fix.

The company says it has optimised the IP network to relieve congestion where it can and will update end-users as soon as further information becomes available. It has not provided a timeframe for when the connection will be restored.

However, according to @MWEBGuy, MWeb’s technical Twitter contact, “Early indications are that it may take up to two weeks to repair the break and restore full capacity.” The cable has been down since Friday.

Seacom launched the first undersea fibre-optic cable, to connect Southern and Eastern Africa with Europe and Asia, in July 2009. The cable connects SA, Mozambique, Tanzania, Kenya and Djibouti with the rest of the world via landing points in France (and onwards to London) and India.

Haven’t heard much from Utande themselves, and their uMax twitter account hasn’t spoken since the 17th.

Of course, other ISPs are also affected by this outage, but I’m sure the other providers are picking up the slack.

We hope this gets sorted soon.

UpdateDandemutande responded in the comments below, and this is what they have to say.

All Dandemutande customers were directly informed about the service disruption twice on Friday via SMS; the first SMS informing them that our main link was down and the second SMS explaining the reason why. Further to that, all our customers received an email update today (Monday) with a full explanation of the situation. Our 24/7 customer service centre has also been in touch with customers over the weekend. Utande and uMAX are running on our backup links, which, as they are contingencies for situations like this, do not perform at the same level as our main link on SEACOM. Dandemutande remains committed to providing the best customer service in Zimbabwe, and is actively seeking resolution with SEACOM and adding further backup capacity during the service disruption.