Africa’s Internet is reeling from multiple undersea cable breaks that are now affecting connectivity on both the east and west coasts.
In the last few weeks, Seacom reported connectivity issues due to breaks in the east coast cable where it runs through the Red Sea. Although operations are in hand to get this repaired, Seacom expects these repairs will take about eight more weeks.
Today, the connectivity situation intensified with cables operated by several different companies experiencing breaks.
Ben Roberts, group CTIO for Liquid Intelligent Technologies in Kenya, reports that the WACS, MainOne and SAT3 cables running up the west coast of Africa are all experiencing faults, impacting several countries’ connectivity.
Worst hit is Ivory Coast, which Netblocks reports plummeted to 4% availability this afternoon. Other West African nations, including Liberia, Ghana, Benin, Burkina Faso and Togo, are also severely impacted, with availability between 17% and 42%.
Other countries impacted by the outages, but still operating at a reasonable level, are Cameroon (58%), Gabon (55%0, Namibia (55%), Niger (69%), Nigeria (72%) and Lesotho (74%).
Although South Africa is experiencing Internet outages, it is clocking in at 82% uptime.
Update:
Angola Cables has issued a statement regarding the disruption to the WACS, SAT-3, MainOne and ACE submarine cables off the West African coast.
While the cause of the reported cable breaks off the Ivory Coast of West Africa has not yet been confirmed, the company is seeking to minimise the impact on Angola and other African countries by redirecting international data and traffic to the SACS cable, which connects Angola directly to Brazil and from there to the US and Europe.
Angola Cables has network backup and restoration solutions available through cables that have not been affected by the faults off the Ivory Coast, according to the statement.
“Our technical team is currently diligently working with industry partners to stabilise international connectivity and to ensure that we can provide support and guarantee the stability of services to African network operators and entities that need it.”