What really caused SA’s internet outage?
Internet users across the continent were hit with a major inconvenience when damaged sea cables caused an internet outage.
Damage to at least four submarine communications cables off the west coast of Africa disrupted services, causing an internet outage across the continent on Thursday.
The West Africa Cable System (Wacs), MainOne, Sat-3 and ACE sea cables were all affected, triggering outages and connectivity issues for mobile operators and internet service providers, according to data from internet analysis firms, including NetBlocks, Kentik and Cloudflare.
The cause of the cable faults at the time of publishing has not been determined.
Most of the world’s internet traffic passes through the scores of fibre optic cables laid along seafloors.
One of the longest cables, at 15 000km, stretches from Portugal to South Africa.
This is not the first time something like this has happened.
As reported by The South African website, in August 2023 two critical undersea communication cables snapped near the mouth of the Congo River.
It took a month to repair.
INTERNET OUTAGE ISSUES STILL ONGOING
Ivory Coast suffered the biggest impact on Thursday’s outage, followed by Liberia, Benin, Ghana and Burkina Faso.
Less severe outages occurred in Cameroon, Gabon, Namibia and Niger, and to a lesser extent in Nigeria and South Africa, according to the global internet surveillance group NetBlocks.
NetBlocks also confirmed during the course of Thursday night that the issues are still ongoing with further declines in connectivity.
⚠️ Update: Metrics show the West and Central #Africa telecoms outage is ongoing, with further declines in connectivity observed to multiple countries through the day; the incident is attributed to cable damage impacting the WACS, MainOne, SAT3 and ACE subsea fiber networks 📉 pic.twitter.com/UW36sKay6J
— NetBlocks (@netblocks) March 14, 2024
Africa’s biggest wireless carriers, MTN Group and Vodacom Group, both said connectivity issues on undersea cable failures were affecting South Africa network providers.
“Breaks in multiple major undersea cables have affected connectivity services in several West African countries,” the MTN Group said in a post on X.
Vodacom wrote on X that the “connectivity issues” were due to multiple undersea cable failures and apologised to its customers for any inconvenience caused.
Earlier today, undersea cable failures between South Africa and Europe impacted SA network providers, including us. We have implemented an alternative solution which means that normal service has been restored to customers. Our sincerest apologies for any inconvenience caused.
— Vodacom (@Vodacom) March 14, 2024
Microsoft Corp. reported disruptions to its cloud services and Microsoft 365 applications across Africa.
“We have determined that multiple fibre cables on the west coast of Africa have been impacted, which reduced total capacity supporting our regions in South Africa,” said Microsoft in a status update.
Microsoft added that Red Sea cable cuts are also impacting the east coast.
The cable faults off the Ivory Coast come less than a month after three telecommunications cables were severed in the Red Sea.
In that incident, the anchor of a cargo ship sunk by Houthi militants was probably responsible.