MTN says that a fault developed on its network after an upgrade, causing intermittent outages for data customers on Tuesday.
“Following an upgrade on a part of the MTN network last night, a fault developed this morning, resulting in some intermittent connectivity issues today,” MTN stated.
“The fault has been repaired and MTN apologises to any customers that may have been inconvenienced by this matter.”
From around 07:00 on 22 November, MTN subscribers started reporting that they could not access the Internet on the operator’s mobile and fixed-LTE networks.
Real-time problem and outage monitoring site Downdetector showed
elevated levels of complaints until around 15:00.
Problem reports dropped off sharply from 15:15 and remained relatively high at 19:00.
Some ongoing complaints include customers who use MVNO services on MTN’s network, like Afrihost Air Mobile and Axxess.
“Any update on hosted LTE networks e.g. Afrihost? MTN mobile working fine but Afrihost LTE connected w/o Internet…” one person said on Twitter.
Afrihost’s network status page said that as of 18:16, MTN engineers were still working on resolving the outage.
Axxess’s network status page also indicated that the outage had not yet been fully resolved.
“Just signed my contract with MTN today and this certainly leaves a bitter taste. Still NO network in my area,” another Twitter user said.
“Literally lost business during this outage! Poor poor service MTN,” saidanother.
This incident is at least the third major outage MTN suffered in the past four months.
On 4 August 2022, the operator’s data network went down in the Free State and Western Cape provinces for over nine hours.
On 12 October 2022, the MTN data network was slow or offline for users across the country for around three hours.