Following Friday’s widespread blackout of asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL) broadband in South Africa on Friday afternoon, Telkom has explained the problem was caused by routine maintenance gone awry.

South African DSL subscribers reported intermittent or complete lack of services on Friday afternoon.

“On Friday, 7 June, at 3.30pm, Telkom performed scheduled planned maintenance work to add new IP (Internet protocol) addresses to the ADSL network,” a company spokesman explains.

“The type of planned maintenance undertaken was classified as non-invasive, low risk and a very mature process routinely used to add new IP addresses to the network,” the spokesman says. “Unfortunately, a problem occurred immediately after commencing the planned maintenance and this resulted in all live ADSL sessions being ‘reset’, commencing approximately 3.49pm.

“ADSL users would be accustomed to a modem or session resets taking on average two minutes. However, the high number of simultaneous reset attempts due to the problem put a significant load on authentication servers and thus the resets took longer than normal and were experienced by customers as downtime.

“The focus, since the problem occurred, was on getting services working and stable as soon as possible. This was largely achieved with most services being back up and stable since approximately 5.30pm on Friday afternoon,” Telkom says.

“The company has now commenced an in-depth investigation into the scripts, processes and underlying network control elements to establish the root cause in order to prevent this from happening in the future.” — (c) 2013 NewsCentral Media