What I Did When The Internet Went Down In Zimbabwe

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So today, the internet went down in Zimbabwe from around 11:45 to 17:17 and this was due to a core platform failure on the Liquid Telecom network which is the backbone of internet service providers in Zimbabwe.

I’ve always known that most of what I do for a living severely depends on having internet access but I guess you end up taking things for granted if they’re always available. When the internet went out, there I was connected to the work WiFi and nothing was working then shortly my mobile data connection followed suit.

If you’ve ever had one of those dreams where you’re just falling and can’t do anything about it, that’s exactly how I felt, helpless.

But hey, there’s nothing I could do to get the internet back up so I had to find something to do in the meantime and stay productive. Well, the first thing I did didn’t really add to the larger goal of being productive as I took a short nap.

It kind of was the perfect time to cash in on one of those midday naps because hey the internet was down and I had just spent the first half of the day trying to understand some code that someone else had written but I wasn’t making any progress there.

Fortunately, my habit of opening too many tabs in my browser ended up being useful today instead of just hogging up my laptop’s resources and almost bringing it to a standstill. Well, that was probably due to me using Chrome before since I started using Firefox Quantum, I haven’t had that problem but hey we can talk about that another day.

So after my nap, I continued on with my research by reading through the web pages that I had opened in those tabs. If those tabs didn’t exist, I would have resorted to reading a book on my phone.

In short, that was my experience when the internet went down in Zimbabwe. Remember that feeling I mentioned earlier, yeah that’s now burned into my mind for a lifetime. Without the internet, some of us can’t do our work or conduct business or even simply access important documents stored online.

Now, that’s just some of us hey. So let us know in the comments, how was your experience when the internet went down? What did you do? Do you think that the internet greatly affects most of our lives? Interested to hear your thoughts and discuss further with you.

11 comments

  1. Anonymous

    Just to clarify Liquid does not provide the backbone for Internet Service Providers in Zim. The outage affected a lot of people because Liquid provides service to Econet, ZOL and maybe some other ISP. Other players such as TelOne and Powertel have their own gateways and their networks were up and running during the outage. The statement on Liquid being the backbone and all is misleading. Also do a more thorough research on what caused the outage!

    1. Garikai Dzoma

      What you are forgetting is that most of these providers also provide redundant capacity to Liquid and ZOL customers. The result is congestion which seems to have brought traffic to a crawl on some subnets. Some people even experienced downtime while others did not. You might have been one of the lucky few who was not affected. I don’t use Liquid affiliated services but I was affected.

    2. Temba

      Telone issued an apology on radio, so it’s not true to say that only ZOL and econet where affected.

    3. charlesmwaks

      TelOne was not up and running

    4. Anonymous

      Telone wasn’t working too hey fiy

    5. Me

      Telone wasn’t working too hey fiy

  2. Gary

    my adsl went down this afternoon. … and not being able to connect to econet mobile Internet either. Sour that didn’t help this terrible cold I have!

  3. Sir_wex

    Well as for me i didn’t even know that the internet was down. Everything was normal

  4. Simba Wesley

    Surely given their importance to ISPs, Liquid has plans to have agile infrastructure that is resilient to failure and then throw in backups somewhere. Most businesses in the formal sector which we’re trying to revive, heavily depend on the internet. They can’t have a single point of failure in their infrastructure.

    I was busy learning a new programming language today doing. Got stuck with some errors and bugs. Tried to get help on Stackoverflow then nothing. I saw the importance of the internet on my life today.

  5. Alex Chipangura

    LOL @Rayhatron, I generally did the same. Read the tabs I had open before the net went down, finished of some work and took a good long nap. I thought it was just me who decided to sleep away the stress :-).

  6. Sachin Yadav

    Oh..Yes..Internet is necessecity nowdays, One can’t do anything without it..Social Lifes, Search Engines, Entertainment, Work, Communication all directly or indirectly depends on Intenet nowdays. As i come from India i find the Internet Quiet Expensive over here than India, but still it is a need to go for Internet Packs or Wifi Connectivity. We are Directly or Indirectly dependent on Internet these Days..and in my view this thing is not going to be down..infact will go up.. People will be requiring more Data over Internet in the coming days,because as we are moving towards the automation and digitalisation..this will be dependent on the Internet anyhow..After some years Internet and its connectivity will become the backbone of the System

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