On March 14, damage to undersea fiber optic cables along West Africa’s coastline caused internet outages in more than a dozen African countries. The impact was severe, causing massive disruption to financial services. The worst affected countries were Ghana, Liberia, Benin and Ivory Coast, with internet connectivity rates of 25%, 17%, 14% and 4% respectively.
Affected service providers include the West African Cable System and services from the African coast to Europe, which suffered downtime, as well as SAT3 and MainOne.
These cables span more than 1.4 million kilometers across the Earth’s oceans, with France, the United States, and Japan being the main suppliers. According to data from Submarine Networks, Egypt has the most submarine cables installed on the African continent with 15. This is closely followed by South Africa and Djibouti with 11, followed by Nigeria, Cameroon and Kenya with six each.
Although the scale of the incident was unprecedented in Africa, cable cuts were relatively common. On average, about 100 of these occur per year. Most service providers try to avoid single points of failure by distributing network capacity across multiple cables as a backup. That’s why you don’t often hear the names of such service providers. The most common cause of cable failure is human activity. However, MainOne ruled out the possibility that human activity was the cause of the internet outage in Africa, suggesting it was caused by “some form of seismic activity under the sea.”
When full service will be restored depends on forecasts. Ghana’s National Communications Authority (NCA) said complete repairs could take up to five weeks.
Some internet users in Nigeria noticed that some Google services, such as YouTube, remained accessible during the outage. Mobile network Globacom also announced that it was not affected by the disruption. Meanwhile, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has revealed that internet services are currently at 90% capacity.
In South Africa, four submarine cables were taken offline at once. The combination of load-shedding challenges and internet outages makes Starlink an attractive alternative for South African customers as it does not use terrestrial or subsea backhaul infrastructure.
While the productivity and economic losses caused by outages may not be quantifiable at this point, there may be a silver lining in the realization of the importance of building a more robust Internet infrastructure on the continent.
