Experts say sabotage, dragging ship anchors or seismic waves may have caused damage to at least three under-sea fibre-optic cables that carry internet traffic to Africa but that the true culprit cannot be determined until a forensic investigation is conducted.
Damage to at least three subsea cables off the West Coast of Africa on Thursday disrupted internet services in Nigeria, Ghana and other countries across the continent.
Telecommunications subscribers and bank users were stranded for hours as the disruption paralysed digital transations and internet communications.
According to one of the world’s leading financial news organisations, Bloomberg, the West Africa Cable System, MainOne and ACE sea cables — arteries for telecommunications data — were all affected on Thursday.
According to data from internet analysis firms including NetBlocks, Kentik and Cloudflare, the cut triggered outages and connectivity issues for mobile operators and internet service providers across the West African sub-region.
The cause of the cable faults has not yet been determined as of press time and the main actors haven’t released any official communication.
In a statement, telecommunications company, MTN Nigeria, explained that the network outage experienced by its subscribers was as 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,” the company said.
The company had also linked network outage experienced by its subscribers for the major part of February 28, 2024 on “multiple fibre cuts”.
“Live network data show a major disruption to Internet connectivity in and around West and Central Africa,” Internet monitoring firm NetBlocks said. “The incident affects networks supplying telecoms via subsea cables to multiple countries and operators.”
MyBroadband reports the downtime is being caused by multiple outages on undersea cables near Abidjan in Côte d’Ivoire.
The SAT-3/West Africa Cable System (WACS), the Africa Coast to Europe (ACE), and other cables are affected. The outage started around 12:30 on Thursday, 14 March 2024.
“Multiple undersea cable failures between South Africa and Europe are currently impacting South Africa’s network providers, including Vodacom,” a Vodacom spokesperson told TechCentral.
Seacom has also reportedly confirmed to TC that the WACS cable has been affected.
Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis at Kentik, indicated there were also issues with the MainOne subsea cable.
Microsoft is reporting network latency issues in its South Africa North and South Africa West locations.
“Starting at 10:30 UTC on 14 Mar 2024, customers using Azure Services in South Africa North and South Africa West may experience increased network latency or packet drops when accessing their resources,” the company said.
“We have determined that multiple fiber cables on the West Coast of Africa — WACS, MainOne, SAT3, ACE — have been impacted which reduced total capacity supporting our Regions in South Africa,” Microsoft said in an update. “In addition to these cable impacts, the on-going cable cuts in the Red Sea — EIG, Seacom, AAE-1 — are also impacting capacity on the East Coast of Africa. This combination of incidents has impacted all Africa capacity – including other Cloud providers and public Internet as well.”
Other impacted customers include Mweb, Openserve, Seacom, Telkom, Vodacom, Vumatel, and Vox. Microsoft customer payment provider Yoco is also facing issues, as is service provider ISSC Group.
“Certain customers are currently experiencing intermittent connectivity issues due to multiple undersea cable failures affecting SA’s network providers, including us,” Vodacom said. “We apologize for any inconvenience caused.”
