African internet restored after outage caused by subsea cable break
Internet speed and data services are gradually being restored after a widespread disruption in many parts of Africa on Thursday and Friday.
Countries including South Africa, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Liberia, the Republic of Benin, Ghana, and Burkina Faso reported a widespread outage, leaving many users disturbed by the development.
Since then, services have largely been restored in Liberia, South Africa, and Nigeria.
West African data center and connectivity provider MainOne declared on Friday that the outage that affected West and Central Africa was caused by a break in its submarine cable system.
The internet giant,owned by data center operator Equinix, explained that an “external incident” resulted in a cut to its cable system in the Atlantic Ocean, offshore Cote d’Ivoire along the coast of West Africa.
The firm, however, ruled out human interference, including a deliberate attack, as a cause for the disruption.
It added that more data would be obtained when the cable is retrieved during repair.
“Our preliminary analysis would suggest some form of seismic activity on the seabed resulted in a break to the cable.
“”Given the distance from land, and the cable depth of about 3 kms (1.86 miles) at the point of fault, any kind of human activity – ship anchors, fishing, drilling etc has been immediately ruled out,” it said.
MTN Nigeria, one of the largest voice and internet data providers in Africa, was also affected by the outage.
In a uniform text message sent to users and seen by Afri Reporters, the South African telecommunication giant apologised to its subscribers over the poor internet speed and data services.
The message reads, “Y’ello! We apologise for the challenges you may be experiencing with internet speed and accessing data services at the moment. This is as a result of damage to international undersea cables across East & West Africa. The repair process is ongoing to resolve the situation as soon as possible. Please look out for further updates.”
