Solar storm brought rarely seen aurora to SA - but may have caused internet cable outage

This weekend's extreme solar storm brought sightings of the aurora australis, or southern lights, to South Africa for the first time since 1989, but it also may have been the reason for an internet outage that hit SA and several east African countries on Sunday.

This is the feedback from Jonathan Ward, interim executive director at South African National Space Agency (Sansa): Space Science, after the most intense solar storm in two decades hit the world this weekend.

Five eruptions of material from the sun's atmosphere arrived starting on Friday evening and persisted through Sunday.