Numerous subsea cables in western and central Africa have experienced failures, resulting in widespread internet outages in the region.
It was not immediately evident what caused the cable failures on Thursday.
Seacom, the African subsea cable provider, has confirmed a service outage on its west African cable system. To mitigate the impact on affected customers, they are now rerouting traffic to the Google Equiano cable, which is also utilized by Seacom.
The email stated that the redirection occurs automatically when a route is influenced.
In Africa, there have been instances of network interruptions due to damaged cables in the past few years. However, according to Isik Mater, director of research for NetBlocks, an organization that tracks internet disruptions globally, the current disruption is more significant than previous ones.
NetBlocks reported that data transmission and measurement indicated a significant interruption in international connections, possibly occurring at or near the locations where submarine network cables are connected.
The outage has impacted twelve countries, causing concerns about disruption of vital services in severely affected states like Ivory Coast.
Africa has a greater percentage of its internet traffic originating from mobile devices compared to other continents. This is evident as numerous industries in Africa utilize the internet to provide services to their clients.
According to Netblocks, a cybersecurity and internet governance monitoring organization, Liberia, Benin, Ghana, and Burkina Faso were significantly impacted.
Cloudflare announced on X that there is still significant disruption to internet services in the Gambia, Guinea, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Benin, and Niger.
Both Namibia and Lesotho were impacted as well.
According to Cloudflare Radar, there appears to be a trend in the frequency of interruptions, affecting countries from the northern to the southern regions of Africa.
Vodacom, a telecommunications company in South Africa, has attributed connectivity issues to failures in undersea cables that have impacted network providers in the country.
According to Mater, when networks try to bypass the damage caused by cable failures, the consequences become more severe. This can potentially limit the amount of available capacity for other countries.
She stated that the first disturbance could be a physical incision, but further problems may be related to technical aspects.
Source: theguardian.com
