West and Central Africa on Thursday experienced a significant internet outage, according to Netblocks, an internet observatory. Multiple subsea cable operators reported failures, though the exact cause remained uncertain.
SEACOM, a key cable operator in the region, confirmed the outage on its West African Cable System, prompting affected customers to be rerouted to the Google Equiano cable, also utilised by SEACOM.
“The redirection happens automatically when a route is impacted,” it said in an email.
Which places experienced the outage?
According to data from Netblocks, Ivory Coast was facing a severe outage, with Liberia, Benin, Ghana, and Burkina Faso also experiencing significant disruptions. Besides this, Cloudflare reported on the X, formerly Twitter, that major internet disruptions were ongoing in Gambia, Guinea, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Benin, and Niger.
“There seems to be a pattern in the timing of the disruptions, impacting from the north to the south of Africa,” Cloudflare Radar said.
Vodacom, the South African telecommunications operator, attributed connectivity issues to undersea cable failures, which in turn affected the country’s network providers.
In recent years, Africa has experienced network disruptions due to cable damage. However, Isik Mater, the Director of Research at NetBlocks, stated that the current disruption is particularly severe, indicating a larger issue at play.
(With Reuters inputs)
