African Countries Hit By Severe Internet Disruption

Uploaded on 2024-03-15 in FREE TO VIEW, BUSINESS-Services-IT & Telecoms

Severe Internet outages has been reported because multiple underwater communications cables reported breakdowns in a dozen of countries across Africa.

Much of West and Central Africa has been left without internet service, as operators of several subsea cables reported failures.

Widespread outages have hit Africa on Thursday 14th March in South Africa, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Liberia, Benin, Gambia, Ghana and Ivory Coast. The West Africa Cable System (WACS), the Africa Coast to Europe (ACE), SAT-3 and MainOne were among the system cables that observers said were affected in Thursday's outage.

Services in Liberia and South Africa have already been restored but it is still a problem in other countries.

One of the biggest network providers in Africa, MTN Group, said that many significant underwater cable failures were the cause of the continued outages.

The South African corporation has released a statement saying, “Our operations are actively working to reroute traffic through alternative network paths.”

The reason for the cable failures was not clear, and has caused serious problems for millions of users around the continent. Network disruptions caused by cable damage have occurred in Africa in recent years. However, this serious disruption points to something larger (and) this is amongst the most severe.

"There seems to be a pattern in the timing of the disruptions, impacting from the north to the south of Africa," said Cloudflare Radar, which provides information on Internet connections.

Internet connectivity in the Ivory Coast was down to around just 4% on Thursday morning and Liberia at one point dropped to 17%, while Benin was at 14% and Ghana 25%.

A fault was also reported on the MainOne cable system which serves Nigeria's commercial hub, Lagos.

Citizens were unable to access the basic Internet as well as social media across the vast majority of the country. International bank transfers were also reported to be affected while there were limited international voice calls.

The Liberia Telecommunications Authority said it was caused by an incident involving the Africa Coast to Europe (ACE) submarine communications cable in Ivory Coast. In Ghana, the National Communications Authority (NCA) reported that multiple undersea cable disruptions were responsible for the outage.

Image: Geralt

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