Active Incident
Confirmed: internet outage in South Africa
South Africa · May 3, 2026 · Ongoing
IODA detected significant connectivity drop in South Africa. 5 critical alerts recorded.
Evidence
59%
Anomaly Rate
5
Measurements
70%
Confidence
What This Means
59% of 5 network tests from South Africa failed to reach these services. Global baseline failure rate is typically 1-3%. This 56+ percentage point difference strongly indicates intentional blocking.
How We Detected This
Data Sourceioda
ML ModelGradientBoosting v3.3 (LOCO median F1 0.87, honest across 127 countries)
Confidence Score70% certainty of censorship
Detection TimeMay 3, 2026
Corroborating Evidence (5)
Evidence collected from multiple independent sources. Upstream claims shown in quotes are not Voidly assertions.
IODAInternet Outage Detection & Analysis5 records
outage
"IODA detected critical level outage for North West"— IODA report
Signal value: 0.59
May 3, 2026
View source →outage
"IODA detected critical level outage for Eastern Cape"— IODA report
Signal value: 0.61
May 3, 2026
View source →outage
"IODA detected critical level outage for Northern Cape"— IODA report
Signal value: 0.58
May 3, 2026
View source →outage
"IODA detected critical level outage for Orange Free State"— IODA report
Signal value: 0.56
May 3, 2026
View source →outage
"IODA detected critical level outage for Limpopo"— IODA report
Signal value: 0.58
May 3, 2026
View source →What we cannot say
- Who caused it — measurement data alone does not attribute this to any government, ISP, or other actor.
- Intent — anomalous or unreachable measurements indicate interference, not a stated motive or a deliberate-vs-incidental determination.
- Which networks — no specific ASN/ISP is identified for this incident.
- The mechanism — we cannot state whether this was DNS tampering, TLS/SNI reset, an HTTP blockpage, throttling, or an infrastructure outage.
- A confirmed duration — we report the observation window, not a verified start/stop of any block.
- Sub-national scope — measurement is aggregated at the country level; we cannot localize to a province, city, or network segment.
- Independent corroboration — this rests on a single source; treat it as a single-source signal, not a multi-source confirmation.
Cite This Incident
Voidly Research. (2026). Confirmed: internet outage in South Africa [ZA-2026-0016]. Voidly Global Censorship Index. https://voidly.ai/incident/ZA-2026-0016