D+mage to at least three subsea cables off the West Coast of Africa on Thursday disrupted internet services in Nigeria, Ghana and other countries across the continent.
According to AP, the MTN Group, one of Africa’s largest network providers, said the ongoing disruptions were a result of failures in multiple major undersea cables. “Our operations are actively working to reroute traffic through alternative network paths,” the South African company said in a statement.
Telecommunications subscribers and bank users were stranded for hours as the disruption paralysed digital transations and internet communications.
According to one of the world’s leading financial news organisations, Bloomberg, the West Africa Cable System, MainOne and ACE sea cables — arteries for telecommunications data — were all affected on Thursday.
AP reports that network disruptions caused by cable damage have occurred in Africa in recent years. However, “today’s disruption points to something larger (and) this is amongst the most severe,” said Isik Mater, director of research at NetBlocks, a group that documents internet disruptions around the world.
NetBlocks said data transmission and measurement shows a major disruption to international transits, “likely at or near the subsea network cable landing points.”
The cause of the failure was not immediately clear.
There were fears of disruption of essential services in worst-hit countries like Ivory Coast where the disruption was severe. Internet analysis firm Cloudflare reported a pattern in the timing of the disruptions that heavily impacted at least 10 countries in West Africa, including Ivory Coast, Liberia, Benin, Ghana, and Burkina Faso. Namibia and Lesotho were also affected.
The impact from such cable failures worsens as networks attempt to route around the damage, potentially reducing the capacity available to other countries, said Mater with NetBlocks. “The initial disruption may be a physical cut, but subsequent issues could be of a technical nature,” said Mater.
