Seacom is one of the primary cables that connects South Africa to the world. Since Friday 22nd March, we've experienced reduced speeds. What is interesting is the technical responses of the local (South African) ISPs to the disruption. Regular HTTP was severely throttled. FTP was disabled completely - it wasn't slow - it was literally switched off. When you tried to load a page, the browser / wget would report nothing for a few seconds, and then after a while would immediately start the download. To me, this suggests that requests were being queued before being sent through. Also, the same symptoms manifested themselves when looking at local websites - a broken undersea cable shouldn't affect that. It's just interesting from a technical standpoint how our ISPs did damage control.