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Frustrated consumers have lashed out at local Internet service provider (ISP) MWeb, after an unplanned network disruption left many without international connectivity.
MWeb confirmed it had lost the connection to its international bandwidth due to road construction damaging a cable at Buccleuch interchange. Both links to Midrand were down at the time of the break.
Reports of the faults started at around noon on Wednesday, but MWeb said the connection was back up and running at 16:00.
Despite the speedy recovery, consumers have criticised the ISP's handling of the situation, as well as the frequency at which these breaks have been occurring.
Posts on customer service complain site HelloPeter.com indicate MWeb had not been taking calls from concerned customers during the outage. One client complained that these types of outages are happening at least twice a month.
“MWeb has put in place redundant links on our network and, despite our best efforts, our international capacity went down yesterday for a short period. This kind of failure is definitely not a regular occurrence and 'category one' network outages have been limited since we launched our uncapped product,” explains Carolyn Holgate, GM of MWeb Connect.
“Unfortunately, an outage like this affected our ADSL customers and no amount of staff or planning can prepare for these circumstances. We immediately notified our customers on all our social media platforms and call centre IVR messaging, providing an estimated time to repair the fault,” she continues.
“We take these outages very seriously and a full investigation has been done from a technical perspective, as well as operationally to ascertain how we could improve our service delivery in the future should this reoccur,” adds Holgate.
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