Africa-Press – Namibia. Staff Reporter
THE Chief Executive Officer of Telecom Namibia, Dr Stanley Shanapinda, has apologised to the nation for the recent network failures experienced by the service provider, stating that he takes full responsibility and that the outage was caused by two high-capacity international links to South Africa.
“As CEO of Telecom Namibia, I take full accountability for the state of our network. The buck stops with me. Once again, I personally and professionally extend my sincere apologies to all affected customers. We appreciate your patience and your trust. We remain committed to continuing to build a stronger, more reliable, and future-ready network for Namibia,” Dr Shanapinda said.
He added that the extended fixed and mobile internet service outages were experienced between the evening of 15 April and the early afternoon of 16 April 2026.
Dr Shanapinda said that the outage was triggered by the failure of two high-capacity international links to South Africa, both of which form part of the country’s primary international connectivity.
“This initial failure led to a cascading impact across multiple layers of our network, including international routing, mobile core systems, billing platforms, and security components,” Dr Shanapinda said.
He added that while there was no single point of failure, the interaction between these complex systems resulted in a nationwide disruption of mobile data and instability in related services.
“Our technical teams worked continuously throughout the night and into the following day. Fixed internet services were partially restored once international routing was stabilised. However, mobile data services required deeper intervention due to dependencies between the mobile core network, charging systems, and security firewalls. Full restoration of all services was completed at 13:50 on 16 April 2026. At the same time, we acknowledge that the duration of the outage is not acceptable, and we have put measures in place to ensure faster turnaround times in future,” Dr Shanapinda said.
He added that this incident has highlighted structural vulnerabilities in parts of Telecom Namibia’s network, particularly where legacy infrastructure and modern systems that have recently been introduced into the network intersect.
“While the immediate cause was external link instability, the extended recovery time demonstrated the need for greater resilience, automation, and modernisation. The legacy network is often vulnerable to failures, but we have made concerted efforts, with a very tight budget, to modernise the network, and we are busy rolling out these plans and will continue to do so. We have clear plans, projects, and timelines, but a very limited budget, which means that we are not always able to modernise the network as fast as we should,” Dr Shanapinda said.
He added that as long-term solutions, Telecom Namibia has successfully upgraded its core border routing infrastructure over the weekend with a next-generation high-capacity router to significantly improve network stability and processing resilience.
“We are accelerating major transformation programmes, including Fixed Mobile Convergence and OSS/BSS modernisation, to reduce dependency on ageing platforms and replace them, thereby strengthening end-to-end service continuity. These projects are expected to be completed in phases in this calendar year and early 2027,” Dr Shanapinda said.
He further noted that the South African routes have recently become more prone to fibre breaks, power outages, and vandalism.
“We are decommissioning unstable international connectivity routes, especially those connecting to South Africa, and are engaging our wholesale partners to migrate remaining services onto more secure and resilient paths,” Dr Shanapinda said.
He concluded that Telecom Namibia is also addressing the issue of copper theft, which has been on the increase in Windhoek, and which he said is driven by scrap yards buying illegal wires. Dr Shanapinda said the institution is engaging NamPol on this growing concern.
For More News And Analysis About Namibia Follow Africa-Press
