Much of West and Central Africa was left without internet connection for several hours on Thursday, due to failures in several submarine cables that serve this part of the continent, according to the cable operators themselves, without the causes being known. reasons that have caused their malfunction. Among the networks that were affected by the outage were the West African Cable System (WACS), the Africa to Europe Cable System (ACE), SAT-3 and MainOne.
In this way, the African submarine cable operator SEACOM confirmed that services on its West African cable system were down since 6 a.m. in Spain and that customers who depended on it had been redirected to the Google Equiano cable, which is also used by this provider.
In recent years there have been network disruptions caused by damage to submarine cables in Africa, especially in the east of the continent and in the Red Sea. However, Thursday's outage "points to something bigger and is one of the most serious," Isik Mater, research director at NetBlocks, a group that documents internet outages around the world, told The Guardian. “The initial outage could have been due to a physical outage, but subsequent problems could have been technical in nature,” Mater added.
The south-facing coast of Côte d'Ivoire is surrounded by a narrow continental shelf, after which the slope plunges into abyssal plains just 10 nautical miles off the coast of Abidjan, and peaks 20 nautical miles off Sassandra. . The narrow platform is interrupted only at one point, in front of the Vridi channel, where the Trou sans fond submarine canyon, which probably follows a fault, begins immediately off the coast. Depending on where the cables run, this canyon could be the culprit for outages if a rockfall were to occur like the Congo Canyon incident last August. However, Ivory Coast has not suffered an earthquake in the last year.
Precisely, one of the most affected countries was Ivory Coast, while Liberia, Benin, Ghana and Burkina Faso suffered a great impact, Netblocks data showed.
For its part, Cloudflare said in a post on X that major outages had occurred in Gambia, Guinea, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Benin and Niger. Namibia and Lesotho, further south, were also affected and South African telecoms operator Vodacom also attributed intermittent connectivity problems suffered by its customers to faults in undersea cables that affected the country's network providers.
According to experts, the reason these southern African countries have been affected is because the impact of cable failures worsens as networks try to avoid the damage, reducing the network capacity available to other countries. .
Africa has a higher proportion of its internet traffic on mobile devices than any other continent, and many of its businesses rely on the network to serve their customers. These outages are an example of how dependent the internet is on undersea cables, which according to Cloudfare are estimated to carry more than 90% of data traffic between continents. At the moment, only a small percentage is done through satellite networks. Currently, there are 529 active submarine cables running approximately 1.3 million kilometers around the world.
