South Africa's third largest network, Cell C, has apologised to its users who were on Saturday left without network for approximately 2 hours. 

The network provider said in a tweet that the network outage was due to a data centre that "experienced a power surge due to load shedding, which tripped the air-conditioning".

To make up for the outage, the provider said it would give each customer 1GB of data valid for five days and would notify customers when the data would be loaded. 

It said the power outage resulted in the multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) system, that enabled the routing of traffic on the network, to overheat and power down.

Additional generators were deployed and the equipment was restored, it said. 

Many users took to social media to express their frustration over the network outage, some casting curses while others were concerned on what was going on. 

In Cape Town, city-managed areas started with stage 1 load shedding at 16:00. 

On Friday evening, the power utility had warned of a high chance of weekend power cuts. It said some generating units were not working due to planned maintenance, while a "higher than expected" number were offline because of technical faults.