MTN South Africa on Thursday experienced widespread downtime, preventing many of its customers from accessing the Internet.
The problems started at about 2pm, the mobile operator said.
“Engineers are still busy investigating the issue and have established some level of stability but the investigations are still ongoing,” MTN said in a statement issued shortly after 4pm.
“The network is busy recovering so services will be restored intermittently. MTN wishes to apologise unreservedly to affected customers for any inconvenience caused.”
The network outage comes just months after MTN experienced a major outage that affecting more than a million users who were unable to use the Internet, send or receive SMSes, or make calls for a period of several days.
At the time, MTN blamed a “minor glitch in the nodes carrying traffic” to affected customers. It has not said what caused Thursday’s downtime.
MTN is South Africa’s second biggest mobile operator by customers after Vodacom. — (c) 2016 NewsCentral Media