SEACOM the undersea cable notorious for bringing South Africans cheap international bandwidth has broken down yet again, leaving lots of South African with limited or no international Internet connectivity at all.

Clients of ISPs making use of SEACOM started reporting connectivity issues from 23:30 last night. MWEB released a statement on Twitter that the cable break is in Cairo and related to a curfew in region engineers delayed to fix.

MWEB is currently running at 65% of its international capacity and in an attempt to provide customers with a pleasant browsing experience during the outages, has cut all P2P traffic. This means that service like bittorrent will not function during the outage.

Many ISP’s has raised concern with one SEACOM client saying that they must really get off this cable system as the “failure rate is ridiculous”.

What are your thoughts? Can you live with cable breaks as long as you have access to cheap Internet?

Some of you may remember that a while back I wrote about the consistent errors Amatomu is giving allot of us. Well after I wanted to rant again yesterday about how I now get greeted with the silly database error everytime I visit the site, I have seen that Amatomu finnaly confessed.

After visiting Amatomu just a while ago, the smerky database error page that made you the end user thought that you broke the site has now been replaced with a message stating that amatomu has reached its end at the Mail & Gardian.

Firstly, apologies for not communicating sooner about the site’s downtime. We were hoping to fix it sooner.

Amatomu has become too expensive for us to maintain and run, as it brings very little revenue, and bears a prohibitive cost for a company whose main product is news.

However, it’s obviously a great little product, and one that deserves to survive. To this end, we’ve offered it to a couple of interested parties. If we have no joy there, we’ll be offering it to the community to run as a community-based service.

Please bear with us as we fix it, and as we go through the process of transferring ownership. We will have clarity within the next five days.

Jason

Technical Manager

Mail & Guardian

Good luck to whoever buys Amatomu, I personaly think that it is a great service and can be changed to become profitable, specialy since there is so much interest in the site. Take Afrigator as an example, surely they are not running their blog aggregator at a los. I will be a firm supporter of Amatomu as soon as all the bugs get ironed out again and is stable enough.

Maybe a few of us web junkies should try and further Amatomu as a Community Project.