LONDON, England, March 19, 2024 — Several countries in West Africa have been grappling with large-scale internet outages since last Thursday, following damage to several undersea fibreoptic cables. Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, Nigeria and Ghana are among the worst-affected, although internet users as far away as South Africa have also been hit.
The incident coincides with a spate of apparent sabotage incidents affecting cables on the opposite side of the continent. Yemen-based Houthi rebels are suspected of severing undersea fibreoptic cables in the Red Sea late last month, affecting internet traffic between East Africa, Asia and Europe.
The cause of the damage to the West African cables has not been confirmed. Several different cables are affected, including the West Africa Cable System (WACS), the Africa Coast to Europe (ACE), MainOne, and SAT3.
MainOne, a Nigerian company, said in a statement that the disruption was “most probably due to environmental factors such as landslides and earthquakes”. It claimed that it could rule out any kind of “human activity” as a cause of the fault, due to the cable lying on a 3km-deep seabed at the point at which the damage occurred.
Undersea cables play a critical role in the global economy. Improvements in connections across Africa over the last decade have helped internet-based businesses flourish, but these connections are extremely fragile. Cables can be severed by sabotage, undersea geological activity, ships dragging their anchors, or even curious sharks. African countries are vulnerable due to the relatively low density of cable connections to many countries.
Several major cable systems extend around large sections of the African continent – Google’s Equiano cable, which runs from Portugal to South Africa, was completed in 2022 – but most of these systems have spurs that create ‘landing points’ with only a handful of countries. Sierra Leone, Liberia and Mauritania, for example, are each connected by a single cable, meaning that any damage can cause a total internet blackout.
South Africa, on the other hand, has multiple connections, so that telecom operators can reroute traffic in the event of an outage. Better cable resilience, backup cables and more data centres in Africa would all help in the event of future disruption. >> Read more
SOURCE: Ben Payton, Infrastructure Reporter, African Business
NOTE: African Business was first published in January 1982. Anver Versi was the first editor of the magazine. Its headquarters are in London.
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