On Monday 15 January 2018 we woke up to no Techzim. The server was down. We thought aaah well the backup will kick in just now… Most of the day went by without access to the site except old news of the military coup non coup. The backup had kicked in alright, but backups had not been happening since November last year as the coup was not happening.
We initiated ‘a hack’ to restore the site content manually. Painstaking work! That night I wrote an article after we had restored the previous week’s articles whilst still working on the other articles. The article announced that we were back up and explained what had happened and what we were doing to get things back up and of course it led with an apology.
I bring back this incident because one of our readers commented and quipped how we always announce when other organisations’ websites or key systems go down. I responded and said how it was going to be difficult to report on such and not feel awkward. Yea, time for me to feel awkward…
The Econet Wireless Zimbabwe website is down, it has been down since around 2 O’clock or at least one of our readers noticed it then. It is giving a 503 server error. Initially we thought the server was processing too many requests but it looks like the server is actually down.
We have reached out to Econet to let them know but we haven’t got feedback yet.
It’s just weird the frequency of these kinda things. Right now the ZMRA system is down and they are losing millions as a result. A few weeks back towards end of last year, the ZSE website and a number of local sites hosted by Yo Africa went down. Not so long ago a big chunk of .co.zw sites were inaccessible due to some problem at Dandemutande. This probably doesn’t say a good story about Zimbabwe if you are outside looking in.
Hack, even the whole internet once shut down in Zimbabwe recently and the reason we were told was a tractor in South Africa… It would be funny if it were not serious.
PS: All the Techzim articles have been restored including the comments. Some of our readers were convinced Big Brother had told us to remove comments when first we restored the articles without comments.
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Econet website has been down for me since Thursday.
Technomag website is down since start of January.They out of Tech Business.
Its now up. Well from my end it is.
So our beloved Techzim is going ‘na na nanana …’ now that econet’s site is down, after theirs went down a week or so ago. Regardless, it speaks to the inadequacy of out tech infrastructure and skills available. A company that maintains a web presence even if a web facing server goes down, usually has standby servers that kick-in as soon a web-facing one goes kaput. We are not there yet because redundancy doesn’t come cheap.
Hahaha, no we can’t celebrate that. It just emphasises your conclusion that we need to do better.