South Africans are suffering from Stage 4 loadshedding as of yesterday, If you want to check the schedule, think again – Eskoms website is currently offline and has been for a few hours.
For the past few hours, Eskom has been suffering IT outages. They have not released any information if this is due to the loss of power at the data centers that supply the IT services.
We are currently loadshedding in stage 4.
— Eskom Hld SOC Ltd (@Eskom_SA) March 11, 2020
We regret that Eskom's systems are currently down and customers are unable to access schedules. Our IT dept is working on the problem and we hope to be back online as soon as possible. We apologise for this inconvenience.
Long periods of loadshedding can cause Uninterruptible Power Supply batteries not to replenish and also the data center itself may not have working generators.
The technical side
Looking further into the issue Eskom appears to be using nameservers that are hosted by iafrica.com. The main website for iAfrica.com is infact not hosted in South Africa which explains the website still being live, they have chose to host their website in Arizona, United States.
Probing deeper the eskom.co.za domain is not replying to “ping” requests which indicates that the servers are offline or unreachable due to connectivity issues.
A quick lookup of the nameservers provided it shows that a large percentage of the websites hosted by iAfrica.com are also unresponsive and suffering the same outage, these tend to be the websites hosted in Johannesburg.
The possibility that iAfrica provides IT services for Eskom is highly likely, Eskom has most likely been placed on a separate web server which is suffering from power loss but this cannot be confirmed. With the current loadshedding situation there is however a high probability that Eskom is now suffering from their own power outages.
