The Eastern African Submarine System (EASSy) and SEACOM cables that were damaged in early May have finally been repaired. The fiber-optic cables, damaged by a trawler off Mtunzini, caused a massive internet slowdown across East Africa.
ITA co-founder and CEO Rolf Mendelsohn shared pictures of the damaged cables.
The EASSy and SEACOM cables were damaged in early May 2024, causing a slowdown of internet service across East and Southern Africa.
Phillipe Devaux, a self-proclaimed observer of the global submarine cable systems industry, said on Tuesday, May 28, 2024, that Orange Marine’s Léon Thévenin was working on the repairs.
The outage was first reported by Ben Roberts, CTIO of Liquid Technologies. All the while internet users in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda reported prolonged internet speeds. In South Africa, users complained of poor Netflix services.
After that, internet providers in East Africa rerouted traffic to West Africa’s cables. This was done to reduce the impact of the damage and improve speeds.
In May, Google launched its second African undersea cable, Umoja. It is the first fiber-optic route to directly connect Africa to Australia. The cable begins in Kenya and passes through countries including the Congo, Rwanda, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe before reaching South Africa.
South Africa is also home to Google’s first data center region in Africa. Umoja was built in partnership with Liquid Intelligent Technologies across the continent.
Umoja is the second Google cable in Africa, after Google’s Equiano. Equiano runs from western Europe, along the West Coast of Africa, between Portugal and South Africa, with branching units along the way.
ORANGE’s Léon Thévenin, the ship tasked with repairing the damaged cables, is a 100-meter cable-laying ship. With various tools on board, such as grapnels, buoys, ropes, and dead weights, it can handle repairs up to 7 km in depth.
