Fresh subsea cable cut causes major internet disruptions in Southern Africa and Kenya

Two submarine internet cables connecting South Africa and Kenya, Eassy and Seacom cables experienced an unexpected outage yesterday thus affecting internet services in several nations across East Africa. According to reports, the immediate cause of the faults could not be established.

Nape Nnauye, Tanzania’s minister of information, communication and information technology said in a statement on Sunday the government had been informed by both companies (EASSy and SEACOM) of disruption to the internet caused by a fault in the cables between Mozambique and South Africa.

“There are ongoing efforts to solve the problem. As they continue to solve the problem, we will have low access to internet and international voice calls”, he said.

Similarly, Ben Roberts, group chief technology and information officer at Liquid Intelligent Technologies, posted on X at around 2 PM on Sunday that internet services in East Africa have been “severely impaired” by the problems with the two cables.

A local platform reported that locals experienced a severe impact on internet usage in Kenya and Tanzania, with social media reports suggesting there is a nearly total internet blackout in some areas.

According to a Netblocks report on X, Tanzania and the French island of Mayotte experienced a high impact on internet connectivity, while Mozambique and Malawi saw a medium impact. The technology company that monitors trends, Cloudflare also reported observed internet disruptions in Tanzania, Malawi, Mozambique and Madagascar as a result of faults.

Users of major networks and internet service providers in Kenya also reported on X that the outages impacted them. Tweets indicated downtime on mobile and fixed-broadband networks such as Safaricom and Telkom Kenya.

Similar: Poor network quality: MTN Nigeria blames fibre cuts, apologises to users

In response, Kenya’s biggest telecoms operator, Safaricom said in a post on the X platform that it had “activated redundancy measures to minimise service interruption” after it was notified of an outage on the one of cables serving the country.

South African internet users don’t appear to have been impacted, as much of the country’s internet traffic flows through cable systems such as Equiano and Wacs along Africa’s west coast. Already, the traffic that had been flowing along the east coast had been rerouted to the west coast given the cable cuts in the Red Sea.

A litany of undersea cable cuts in Africa

The fact that both systems went off at the same time would suggest some sort of undersea event like the one that severed four cables off Ivory Coast in West Africa in mid-March, has caused the latest outage.

Recall that four undersea telecommunications cables went offline around the same time on Thursday, 14 March 2024 — the West Africa Cable System (WACS), Africa Coast to Europe (ACE), MainOne, and SAT–3. Bloomberg reports gathered that the damage affected major undersea cables near Abidjan in Côte d’Ivoire.

These outages caused major Internet disruptions across the continent, including Nigeria and South Africa.

In Nigeria for instance, bank customers and telecom subscribers have been bearing the brunt of the internet service disruption as many could not transact business on their accounts. Telecom data services have become very poor, frustrating many subscribers.

According to reports from local media, the undersea damage has also caused a massive internet problem in South Africa. The West Africa cables have been recently repaired and returned to service after more than a month of being offline.

Read also: Undersea cable cuts: Nigerian telco association vow to restore 100% service today

The problems in East Africa could not come at a worse time for the region given that three subsea cables in the Red Sea, which connect Africa and Southeast Asia to Europe, remain unrepaired after they were damaged in late February.

Those cables – Seacom, EIG and AAE-1 – were reportedly severed after a ship, which was attacked by Houthi rebels from Yemen, dropped its anchor, tearing them up. The ship later sank.