Major Internet Disruptions in South Africa: What Website Owners Should Know
South African internet users experienced widespread connectivity problems this week, with several websites and online services affected by intermittent access issues.
According to reports from MyBroadband, the disruption affected a range of local and international online platforms, including news websites, government services and hosting-related platforms.
While not every outage has been confirmed as part of the same incident, the timing of these issues coincided with large-scale distributed denial-of-service attacks, commonly known as DDoS attacks, targeting South African web hosting and internet infrastructure providers.
What Happened?
A DDoS attack is when a network or website is flooded with large volumes of traffic in an attempt to overwhelm the infrastructure behind it. When this happens at scale, it can cause websites, control panels, email services and hosting platforms to become slow, unstable or temporarily unavailable. For a fuller explanation of how these attacks work and the safeguards used in Rhino Hosting’s environment, read our guide to DoS and DDoS attacks.
MyBroadband reported that Xneelo experienced network degradation on Tuesday, 19 May 2026, with customers potentially unable to access hosting services and control panels during the incident.
Other South African infrastructure providers were also reportedly affected by similar attacks, with some attacks reaching extremely high traffic volumes. These included attacks measured in hundreds of gigabits per second, with some reports indicating peaks as high as 1Tbps.
Why This Matters for Website Owners
For businesses, this is an important reminder that websites do not operate in isolation. Even if your own website has not been directly attacked, your hosting provider, upstream network, DNS provider or internet route can still be affected by wider infrastructure problems.
When large-scale attacks target hosting networks, the impact can include slow website loading, failed logins, email delivery delays, inaccessible control panels and temporary downtime.
This does not always mean that your website itself is broken. In many cases, the problem may sit higher up in the network or with a third-party infrastructure provider.
What Website Owners Should Do During an Outage
The first step is to avoid making unnecessary changes to your website while the issue is ongoing. If the problem is caused by a hosting or network-level incident, changing plugins, themes or DNS records may make troubleshooting more difficult later.
It is better to check your hosting provider’s status updates, test the website from more than one network and confirm whether other services are also affected.
If your website is business-critical, it is also worth having proper monitoring, regular offsite backups and a reliable hosting provider that has mitigation measures in place for attacks of this nature.
Our View
Incidents like this show how important reliable hosting, proper security and ongoing website monitoring have become. A website is often the first point of contact between a business and its customers, so downtime can quickly affect enquiries, sales and trust.
No hosting environment can guarantee that the wider internet will never experience problems, but strong infrastructure, active monitoring and proper support can make a significant difference when incidents occur.
For South African businesses, this is also a reminder to take website maintenance seriously. Security, backups, uptime monitoring and hosting support should not be treated as optional extras. They are part of keeping a business visible and accessible online.
Need Help Checking Your Website?
If your website has been slow, unavailable or showing errors during the recent connectivity problems, we can help you check whether the issue is related to your website, hosting, DNS, email or a wider network problem please feel free to Contact Us
Source: This article was curated from reporting by MyBroadband.