On Sunday, internet services on the East African coastline were severely impaired due to faults on the EASSy submarine cable and Seacom subsea cable. The Communication Authority of Kenya (CA) in a circular to the media confirmed subsea cable cuts had occurred at Mtunzini, South Africa. This disrupted internet access in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and Mozambique, and a few other countries. Today, a cable repair ship is set to travel to the site to carry out repairs.
“A cable repair ship based in Cape Town has been mobilised and will sail on Tuesday morning. Transit to the site will take three days. The repair time will be dependent on weather, sea conditions and the extent of the damage” said Chris Wood, group CEO, WIOCC.
Leon Thevenin is an one of the 60 cable laying ships in the world. It arrived back in Cape Town on 25th April after carrying out repairs on the West African coastline after massive cable cuts affected 13 countries. This is the cable repair ship mobilized to work on the East African coastline cable cuts.
After the incident occurred, Seacom confirmed its POPs (points of presence) in both Maputo and Dar es Salaam were unreachable. The internet observatory institution, Netblocks, reported that both Tanzania and the Island of Mayotte had suffered high impact to their internet services.
Netblocks’ report covers 12 countries with most suffering medium to low impacts. Kenya did suffer intermittent outages but internet service provision was soon restored. Although, it remained slow and patchy for most of Sunday.
The country is served by 4 other submarine cables that remain active. CA statement confirmed that TEAMS cable is operational and unaffected. Further, redundancy on the South Africa route has been activated to minimize the impact.
Airtel Kenya, Safaricom and Telkom Ltd all confirmed they had restored internet services to all their customers. However, they did state that internet speeds may be slow occasionally until submarine cable repairs are complete. Liquid Technologies’ Ben Roberts was quick to applaud the fast restoration of internet in Kenya.
Update on internet services restoration
The Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) has provided an update on the restoration efforts noting that internet services are back to “near normal.”
“We note and appreciate efforts made by mobile network operators and internet service providers to restore internet services and keep the country connected through the acquisition of additional capacity in other undersea fibre cables.” The CA writes in a statement seen by Techweez.
Furthermore, the CA notes that the backlog generated by the outage might take some time to clear.
Update, 16th May 2024: Included a statement from the CA.
Update, 16 May 2024: Internet services are back to “near normal.”
