Azure Services - Network latencies - South Africa North and South Africa West

Impact Statement: Starting at 10:30 UTC on 14 Mar 2024, customers using Azure Services in South Africa North and South Africa West may experience increased network latency or packet drops when accessing their resources.Current Status: We have determined that multiple fiber cables on the West Coast of Africa — WACS, MainOne, SAT3, ACE — have been impacted which reduced total capacity supporting our Regions in South Africa. In addition to these cable impacts, the on-going cable cuts in the Red Sea — EIG, Seacom, AAE-1 — are also impacting overall capacity on the East Coast of Africa. These incidents together had reduced the total network capacity for most of Africa's regions. We've added the additional network capacity, however, there has been a slight amount of instability in the newly added links. We're working with the partner carrier to investigate the issues. Additionally, we're planning to add additional capacity within the region over the weekend and into next week to bring more headroom into the region. Once our additional capacity is stable, we plan to re-enable Azure Front Door (AFD) routing within the South Africa region to improve some application performance. As we continue to work on further increasing the capacity, our telemetry shows signs of recovery, and packet drops have reduced significantly. Many of the Azure Services that were affected by this issue earlier have now returned to normal functionality. We are validating for any remaining impacted services, however customers should notice considerable improvements.  Customers who are experiencing severe disruption to their operations may want to consider their BCDR options. The next update will be provided in 4 hours, or as events warrant.