Statement by Vodacom (T) on network outage

Rene Meza

Dar es Salaam, 5th Feb, 2014 — We sincerely apologize for not being able to provide services to our esteemed customers and the public in general on the morning of February 5, 2014. This was due to cuts on our primary fibre cable on Morogoro Road and two more on our secondary fibre at Mlalakuwa (just before the bridge) and Mayfair Plaza on Mwai Kibaki Street.

The damage to our fibre cables caused a network outage because our two data centres – one in Oysterbay and the other in Mbezi Juu - which are supposed to support each other in the event of one of them failing,
were both affected.

As a result of this, customers were unable to make voice calls, use the internet and do money transfers. We understand the inconvenience that this outage caused them and would like to once again apologize and thank them for their patience, loyalty and support while we worked to restore our services.

Our engineers were able to fix the damage on Mwai Kibaki Road that was caused by the ongoing road construction. The damage to the Mlalakuwa cable took a while to fix because it had melted following a fire that had been lit to burn garbage that had been dumped on our fibre cable which passes through the area.

I would like to assure our esteemed customers that we at Vodacom remain committed to continue providing them with world-class services.

Thank you for your support, patience and understanding.

Rene Meza
Managing Director