A number of countries across Africa experienced Internet outages on Thursday due to damage to submarine fiber optic cables. A total of 13 countries were reported to be initially affected. Of the 13, some including Ghana and Nigeria, are still suffering from nationwide outages. The source of the cable damage is undetermined.
The cable cuts were officially confirmed by the Nigerian Communications Commission. Part of the statement from the commission read:
“Multiple network providers reported Internet outages yesterday, and Cloudflare’s Radar tool, which monitors Internet usage patterns, detailed how the outage seemingly moved from the northern part of West Africa to South Africa. All 13 countries (Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea, Liberia, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, South Africa, The Gambia, and Togo) reportedly suffered nationwide outages, with most seeing multiple networks hit.”
Submarine Cable Cut Location
The combination of cable cuts led to equipment faults on the major undersea cables along the West African Coast. Consequently, data and fixed telecom services in several countries of West Africa, including Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, Cote de Ivoire, among others were impacted. Cuts to the fibre cables are said to be somewhere in Cote de’Ivoire and Senegal, with an attendant disruption in Portugal.
Africa Coast to Europe (Ace) subsea cable, runs along the west coast of Africa between France and South Africa. This crucial cable of 17,000 km connects 19 countries in Europe and Africa. Additionally, there is the West African Cable System (WACS) also in the West Coast route from Europe.
The two experienced faults while South Atlantic 3 (SAT3) and MainOne have downtime. Similar undersea cables providing traffic from Europe to the East Coast of Africa, like Seacom, Europe India Gateway (EIG), Asia- Africa-Europe 1 (AAE1), are said to have been cut at some point around the Red Sea, resulting in degradation of services across on these routes.
Cloudflare reported that internet disruptions in some African countries varied in duration. The Gambia and Guinea experienced the shortest outages, lasting only about 30 minutes. In contrast, South Africa’s disruption was much longer, at five hours, and some countries are still facing ongoing internet issues.
The Sierra Leonean Ministry of Communication, Tech and Innovation confirmed that ACE submarine service to the country was fully restored. The services were back up in under an hour.
Cable Repair Period
Repair works are still ongoing. While some nations are already back to normal service, some may wait longer. MainOne, a submarine cable company, says repairs for damaged cables could take up to five weeks.
In a statement the company said, “We have a maintenance agreement with Atlantic Cable Maintenance and Repair Agreement to provide repair services for the submarine cable. First, identify and assign a vessel, the vessel has to retrieve the necessary spares required for repair, and then sail to the fault location to conduct the repair work.”
While repair work is estimated to take between 1 to 2 weeks, it may take up to 3 weeks for the vessels to pick up spares in Europe and transit to the site on the African coastline.
Africa is served by the French cable-laying vessel Léon Thévenin. The problem is Leon Thevenin is Africa’s only fulltime fiber repair vessel. However, Marine Traffic shows that the cable layer Sophie Germain is en route from the Port of La Seyne-sur-Mer in Toulon, France to a yet to be confirmed site.
Cable cuts are not frequent but occur. In early March, three undersea fiber cables in the Red Sea were cut. This impacted negatively an estimated 25 percent of Internet traffic in the Middle East, Asia, and Europe and forced plans to reroute traffic.
Last year in September, WACS, ACE submarine cable, Angolan domestic festoon system, and the SAT-3 cables snapped. The breakage of the cables was attributed to rockfall in the Congo Canyon.
When cuts happen companies have mechanisms in place to route internet and other communication traffic to alternative cables to minimize disruption to service for consumers and businesses. Seacom confirmed it had rerouted its WCAS customers to the Equiano cable.
