MWeb fixed-line broadband customers in Johannesburg and Pretoria were without international bandwidth until at least 4pm on Wednesday following a fibre-optic cable break.

The Internet service provider says there was an outage caused by two severed cables, which were damaged by road construction at the Buccleuch Interchange near Woodmead in Johannesburg.

The fault has apparently now been fixed.

“The two backhaul links that connect our data centre in Victory Park to the Neotel data centre in Midrand have been damaged,” says MWeb ISP CEO Derek Hershaw.

“The effect is that we lost access to our Seacom bandwidth.”

Hershaw says engineers from Dark Fibre Africa have repaired one of the cables and service had been restored to a “sizeable portion” of MWeb’s customer base.

Both damaged cables connect MWeb to its capacity on the Seacom submarine cable.

Cape Town and Durban users were not been affected by the outage. — Staff reporter, TechCentral