At least 10 countries in West Africa have been experiencing network outages since Thursday (14), with South Africa also affected. Bloomberg, Agence France-Presse, The Times of India and other media reported that millions of subscribers have been affected by damage to multiple undersea cables in Africa. The cause of the damage to the cables remains unclear, although movement of the seabed is one of the possible causes.
Ghana’s National Communications Authority (NCA) said on the 17th that it had held a meeting with four service providers, and that it was expected that it would take at least five weeks to complete the repair of the undersea cables before services could be fully restored.
South Africa’s MTN Group, one of Africa’s largest network providers, said the continued Internet outages were due to the failure of a number of major submarine cables, and that the company was actively working on restoring transmission through alternative network paths. MainOne, a West African ISP, said on the 17th that it was working on restoring service to some of its customers through the cable system that is still available.
Ghana’s National Communications Authority (NCA) noted that the service provider has located the approximate location of the damage and is ready to dispatch a repair vessel. The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) also said that submarine cable operators said they were actively working on repairs and that services were gradually being restored.
Data from NetBlocks, a network monitoring organization, showed severe disruptions in network connectivity in several West African countries, including Ivory Coast, Liberia, Benin, Ghana, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, and Cameroon. Several network companies in South Africa also reported service disruptions.
The affected cables were noted to be West African Cable System (WACS), Africa Coast to Europe (ACE), SAT-3, and MainOne. a spokesperson for network analytics firm Cloudflare said repairs could take weeks to months depending on the location of the damage, what needs to be repaired, and the local weather conditions.
Ghana’s main stock exchange extended trading hours by an hour on the 14th and 15th due to the network service disruption, while banking services in Nigeria had been paralyzed.
