We Tracked Every Fibre Outage for 5 Straight Days

Afrihost, like most large fibre resellers, runs a public network status page that lists outage notices as its field teams and upstream network operators report them. Because Afrihost resells capacity from more than 40 different fibre networks - not just the household names like Openserve, Vumatel, Frogfoot and MetroFibre, but smaller regional operators like Clear Access, FMAS Networks, Gaia Fibonacci and Netstream too - its status board ends up functioning as a rough, real-time window onto outages across a wide slice of the whole SA fibre market, not just Afrihost's own customers.

We watched that board for five days, from 29 July to 2 August 2026, and logged every outage notice it posted. The result: 14 separate incidents across 8 different networks and 14 different suburbs. Below is the complete list, unedited and in the order it was reported - followed by what it can responsibly tell you, and, just as importantly, what it can't.

Fourteen incidents, oldest first. Each one is exactly as Afrihost's status board described it at the time we checked - we haven't paraphrased the affected-area wording or guessed at a cause beyond what the board itself stated.

Grouped by network, MetroFibre shows up most (3 incidents), followed by Frogfoot, Clear Access and FMAS Networks (2 each), with Openserve, Vumatel, Vuma Reach, Gaia Fibonacci and Netstream logging one apiece. Read on their own, raw counts like that invite exactly the wrong conclusion, because they ignore network size entirely - a network passing 500,000 homes and a network passing 2 million homes logging the same number of incidents are not equally reliable, they're wildly different.

Where a network's homes-passed figure is independently published (see our benchmarks page for sourcing), we've normalised the incident count against it below. Where it isn't - four of the eight networks in this log have no independently published homes-passed figure we could verify - we're showing that gap rather than inventing a number to fill it.

Normalised this way, MetroFibre's rate in this window (about 0.59 per 100,000 homes passed) comes out roughly 12 times Vumatel's (about 0.05) and about 9 times Openserve's (about 0.06). That's a real difference in this specific 5-day sample - but it would be a mistake to read three incidents at one network and one at another as proof of a genuine reliability gap. A single cable break, a single contractor's digger, or a single ageing joint failing can double or triple a small network's count in a five-day window without reflecting anything structural about how that network is run. Meaningful reliability comparisons need months of consistent data, not five days - which is exactly why we're publishing the raw log rather than a ranking.

For a second, independent reference point, our benchmarks page already tracks Ispa's February 2026 member survey - 406 ratings from 45 ISPs, scoring each major network out of 10 on reliability, support and related metrics. It's a completely different data source, gathered a different way, over a much longer period. Here's how the four majors that appear in our outage log scored in that survey:

There's no clean story here, and we're not going to manufacture one. Openserve and MetroFibre - the two networks with published, ISP-count-backed scores - sit closest together (6.5 and 6.4) despite a 12x gap in our outage tally, and both saw their score fall year-on-year. Frogfoot and Vumatel's rated-by counts weren't published in Ispa's report, which limits how much weight their scores alone can carry here. The honest read: a 5-day outage count and a 6-month-old satisfaction survey are measuring different things, and neither one should be read as a substitute for the other. Use the full Ispa breakdown for network reputation over time, and a live status board for what's happening in your suburb right now.

Every incident logged in our window carried the same severity label: Medium Impact. Afrihost's board didn't define exactly what separates a Medium-impact outage from a High or Critical one in the copy we could see, but by elimination, this window contained nothing the board's own system considered severe enough to escalate above that middle tier - no network-wide event, no multi-day outage, no incident affecting more than one suburb at a time.

If you suspect an outage in your own area, the fastest way to confirm it is a status board rather than a support call: check your own ISP's status page first, since most resellers run one, and cross-reference against Afrihost's public fibre status page if your ISP doesn't. If your suburb and network combination shows up as a known, already-being-worked incident, you can skip the support queue entirely and just wait it out. If it doesn't show up anywhere, the fault is more likely local to your own line or in-house equipment - our guide to fibre cable breaks covers the fault-indicator lights that tell you which case you're in within seconds, and our backup power guide covers the separate scenario where the issue is a power cut at your ONT rather than the fibre line itself.

Nothing here should move you off a network purely on the strength of a 5-day snapshot - that's the central, repeated caveat of this piece, and it's worth restating plainly. What it should change is how you weigh a single bad outage story, whether from a friend, a review site or your own recent experience: one incident, or even three, tells you very little about a network serving hundreds of thousands or millions of homes.

A short checklist for reading outage claims about any SA fibre network sensibly:

• Normalise for size before comparing. A network with 2 million homes passed will rack up more absolute incidents than one with 400,000 simply by having more infrastructure exposed to damage - raw counts without that context are close to meaningless.
• Look for patterns over months, not days. Our own five-day sample here isn't enough to draw a reliability conclusion from, and neither is anyone else's short-window anecdote.
• Check the actual status board for your address before signing up. Confirm coverage on our fibre coverage map, then ask any ISP you're considering which upstream network they resell and whether that network runs a public status page.
• Weigh survey data and live status data together, not one instead of the other. A network can score well on a satisfaction survey and still have a bad week - and vice versa - which is exactly what this snapshot and the Ispa numbers above show side by side.