The news:
- Many African countries are experiencing Internet outages as major undersea cables have been damaged.
- NetBlocks, a company that provides data on Internet connectivity, confirmed that disruptions is intensified in West Africa.
- Although unconfirmed Houthi rebels have been blamed for the cable damage. And while service providers are working to remedy the problem, there has been no communication on when the problem will be solved.
Internet connection in some parts of Africa has worsened due to undersea cable breakage. Ghana’s Chamber of Telecommunications said in a statement on Thursday, March 14 2024 that there are outages on multiple submarine cables that enter the country.
It said these outages are affecting mobile network operators and Internet service providers to varying degrees which has caused subscribers to experience bad connections.
In Nigeria, Internet disruptions have hit banks as some customers are unable to carry out transactions via bank apps and USSD.
Per Atlas News, Ivory Coast's largest Internet providers, Orange CI and MTN have also reported Internet outages.
According to NetBlocks, a website that provides data on Internet connectivity worldwide, outages in West Africa have been the worst in Africa.
“Live network data show today's telecoms disruption in Africa has intensified; the incident has high impact to West Africa with significant reductions in connectivity evident across the continent; operators report multiple subsea cable failures.”
ITWeb also reported that South African IT company, Dimension Data informed its customers that there was a cable failure on the West Africa Cable System, which prompted the company to run traffic through Internet provider, Seacom.
However, Seacom’s Internet cable was recently damaged in the Red Sea and it is still waiting for a permit to fix it.
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It was reported in February that Houthi rebels were responsible for the destruction, which has affected four Internet cables, — AAE-1, Seacom, Europe India Gateway (EIG), and TGN systems.
Although Seacom could not confirm that the rebels were responsible for the cable destruction, it said, “the location of the cable break is significant due to its geopolitical sensitivity and ongoing tensions, making it a challenging environment for maintenance and repair operations,”
Interestingly, this is not the first time damage to undersea cables have caused internet disruptions, in 2020, MTN blamed undersea cables for Internet disruptions in West Africa.
In 2018, 10 West African countries were completely offline for 48 hours, due to damages to the African Coast to Europe (ACE) submarine cable.
MainOne’s 14,000 km submarine cable system also disrupted the Internet in 2017 across West Africa. This time, however, Internet troubles seem to go beyond Africa to some European countries, which could mean a more severe problem this time.
