Many African countries are without internet due to faulty submarine cables

Several African countries have been affected by significant and unprecedented internet outages since the early hours of Thursday March 14 due to anomalies related to some submarine cables.

In all, a dozen countries along the Atlantic coast, from South Africa to Liberia, including Benin, Ghana and Nigeria, were affected, according to CloudFlare, a company specializing in network infrastructure, and NetBlocks, an organization that documents internet outages around the world. .

The incidents began in southern Senegal at 5 a.m. local time (6 a.m. Paris time) on Thursday, spread southward early in the morning and reached Nigeria after 10 a.m., according to Cloudflare.

The severity of the outages varied, with some countries experiencing outages for only a few minutes while others remained heavily affected into Friday morning. The most affected country is Côte d’Ivoire, where the two largest operators, Orange and MTN, are severely disrupted. Only one of the country’s three operators, Moov, is operating normally. Cloudflare data shows that only 15% to 20% of normal internet traffic was reported in the country on Thursday.

The cause of the outage is not yet known

The cause of the outage is not known. The Nigerian Telecom Regulator has mentioned in a press release A combination of cable cutting (position) Somewhere in Ivory Coast and Senegal », “As a result of equipment failure”. Some experts suspect a physical event first, such as a cable breaking due to a ship’s anchor or movement of the seabed, followed by a series of technical anomalies due to a sudden overload that redirected traffic to another cable.

Damaged cables have caused other network disruptions in Africa in recent years. however, “Today’s disruption is the most serious,” Isik Mater, director of research at NetBlocks, observes. An official Ivorian source told RFI that cables that were supposed to be taken in the event of a rupture were also affected, the source described the situation. “unpublished”. According to Microsoft, the importance of these disruptions is also illustrated by the recent damage to cables on the other side of the continent, in the Red Sea, which already degraded African connectivity. Africa leads the world in web traffic for mobile devices and many businesses on the continent rely on the internet to provide services to their customers.

MTN Group, one of the heavyweights in telecommunications in the region, explained in a press release “Actively work to redirect traffic”. Orange, established in the very area, says “Fully dynamic to explore traffic rerouting solutions and connect countries separated by other routes”. “Several land links have already been strengthened to allow improvement in the situation” Specifies the operator quoted by the RFI. MainOne, the company that operates the cable of the same name, which is affected by the fault, Also said “All resources were mobilized to repair cables and restore services”.

The outage mainly concerned the West Africa Cable System, Africa Coast to Europe, SAT-3 and MainOne cables, all ten thousand kilometers long, serving several countries along the West African coast and connecting to Europe, particularly Spain, the United Kingdom. and France.

Most Internet traffic passes through more than 500 undersea fiber optic cables deployed around the world. Meta, for example, does not have a data center in Africa: all of the company’s user data in West Africa goes through one of these cables.