Repair Works Begin After Major Internet Outages Across Several African Countries

Repair works have commenced on the undersea cable cuts that resulted in internet outages in several African countries.

Reports revealed that repair work is ongoing on the undersea cable cuts that caused multiple internet outages. The disruptions were caused by damage to four subsea cables off the West African coast, including the West Africa Cable System, MainOne, South Atlantic 3, and ACE sea cables.

What Happened to Some African Countries’ Internet Connectivity?

On Thursday, March 14th, internet outages hit West, East, and Central Africa. Major providers like MainOne and Seacom confirmed damage to subsea cables as the culprit.

Internet service was disrupted across West, East, and Central Africa. NetBlocks, a watchdog organization that monitors cybersecurity and internet governance, reports severe outages in Ivory Coast, Liberia, and Benin. Disruptions also affected Ghana, Nigeria, and Cameroon.

Telecoms Infrastructure Disruptions Across Africa

As a result, telecommunications subscribers and bank users have been stranded, and the disruption has paralysed digital transactions and internet communications. 

Cable companies—West African Cable System (WACS) and African Coast to Europe (ACE) on the West Coast route from Europe have experienced faults, while SAT3 and MainOne have downtime. 

Similar undersea cables providing traffic from Europe to the East Coast of Africa, like Seacom, Europe India Gateway (EIG), and Asia-Africa-Europe 1 (AAE1), are said to have been cut at some point around the Red Sea, resulting in degradation of services across on these routes.

The Cause of The Internet Connectivity Outages

On Friday, MainOne, one of the affected digital infrastructure service providers, said an “external incident” cut its cable system in the Atlantic Ocean offshore Cote d’Ivoire along the West African coast. This ruled out human activity as a cause.

“Given the distance from land and the cable depth of about 3km (1.86 miles) at the point of fault, any kind of human activity – ship anchors, fishing, drilling, etc.- has been immediately ruled out.” 

“Our preliminary analysis suggests some seismic activity on the seabed caused the cable to break,” MainOne said, adding that it will obtain more data when the cable is retrieved during repair.

In addition, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) said in a statement that operators of the damaged cables had commenced repairs and that internet services were gradually being restored.

How Long Will The Repairs Be Completed

MainOne said the situation might persist for two to three weeks before the problem can be fixed. The data center and connectivity solutions provider has a maintenance agreement with Atlantic Cable Maintenance and Repair Agreement (ACMA) to provide repair services for the submarine cable.

“Sailing to the fault location for the repair work might take one to two weeks,” MainOne stated. “About two to three weeks of transit time may be required for the vessel to pick up the spares and travel from Europe to West Africa once it is mobilised.”

How would the repairs be done? MainOne will identify and assign a vessel. The vessel will retrieve the necessary spares and then sail to the fault location to conduct the repair work. Next, to complete the repair, the affected section of the submarine cable will have to be pulled from the seabed onto the ship, where skilled technicians will splice it.

“Post-repair joints will be inspected and tested for any defects, and then the submarine cable will be lowered back to the seabed and guided to a good position,” MainOne stated.

Some operators, like fibre network operator Seacom, have temporarily redirected their customers. The undersea fibre provider redirected its customers on the affected cable to the Google-backed Equiano cable it owns, “ensuring uninterrupted services to our clients and continued traffic flow.”

Despite the challenges on WACS, the company said in a statement that “services remain robust and fully operational, without any congestion on its links that aggregate client traffic”. 

MainOne also said restoration capacity for temporary relief would be available to customers. “While we do have some pre-configured restoration capacity on other cable systems, unfortunately, those cable systems are also down currently. We have since acquired capacity on available cable systems, but we have not found readily available capacity to restore services to all our customers fully.”