South African internet provider Afrihost has broken its silence on a series of disruptive fibre outages that plagued customers over the last two months, providing a detailed technical explanation and outlining the concrete steps taken to prevent a recurrence.
The ISP, known for its high service standards, acknowledged that a cluster of unrelated issues caused significant downtime. The problems were primarily rooted in two areas: its own IP address allocation system (DHCP) and a cascading network failure triggered by a fibre network operator (FNO).
The first major outage in August was caused by a glitch that assigned duplicate IP addresses to customers, causing widespread session instability. Afrihost has since rebuilt the affected service and enhanced its synchronisation mechanisms.
A second, more widespread outage in September was triggered by a “broadcast storm” originating from a fibre operator’s network (believed to be MetroFibre), which then congested Afrihost’s own infrastructure. In response, Afrihost has strengthened its broadcast suppression policies and added new network segmentation to better isolate such external faults.
The company confirmed that two shorter outages in October were also related to the DHCP system, specifically a database integrity issue. Automated integrity checks and replication monitoring have now been activated to ensure greater reliability.
By publicly detailing these technical faults and their solutions, Afrihost is aiming to rebuild trust with its user base, demonstrating that it has not only fixed the immediate problems but has also fortified its network against similar failures in the future.
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