On Thursday, March 14, an incident involving damage to an undersea cable caused widespread disruption to internet services in Nigeria and other parts of Africa.
The disruption extended to South Africa, Ghana, Kenya, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Cameroon, and Benin.
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The affected undersea cables near Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, resulted in downtime for various nations across West and South Africa.
According to The Nation, Vodacom announced in a statement on X that:
“Certain customers are currently experiencing intermittent connectivity issues due to multiple undersea cable failures affecting SA’s network providers, including us. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.”
The disruption has impacted various services like Microsoft Azure and Office 365.
According to The Nation, quoting Bloomberg, undersea cables, including the West Africa Cable System, MainOne, and ACE, were affected on Thursday, hindering telecommunications data flow.
Consequently, some Nigerian bank networks experienced downtime, leading to transaction processing issues.
MTN addressed customer concerns regarding the poor internet connectivity by releasing a statement elucidating the root cause.
MTN said:
“We apologize for the challenges you may be experiencing with internet speed and accessing data services at the moment.
“This is a result of damage to international undersea cables across East & West Africa. The repair process is ongoing to resolve the situation as soon as possible. Please look out for further updates.”
Internet outage in North Africa
The most recent disruption occurred following a service interruption experienced by Seacom, a subsea cable operator, on its cable network in the Red Sea.
Seacom announced last week that it was awaiting permission to commence repairs on the damaged underwater cable in the Red Sea.
This sea route is important in telecommunications, as a vital link between Europe, Africa, and Asia through Egypt.
The impaired cables are responsible for approximately a quarter of the region’s internet traffic, as estimated by HGC Global Communications, a Hong Kong-based internet provider reliant on these cables.
To mitigate the impact of the outage, traffic has been redirected through alternative cable routes, including those along the west coast of Africa.
Source: Legit.ng
