Two undersea cables running along Africa's east coast suffered a failure on Sunday. (UserGI15994093/Getty Images).
- Internet outages occurred in South Africa on Sunday due to failures in two submarine cables on the continent's east coast.
- This comes days after all submarine cables on Africa's west coast were repaired.
- This fault affected several countries more than South Africa.
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Two undersea internet cables failed simultaneously on Sunday, disrupting internet services in South Africa and much of the continent's east coast.
This was confirmed by Ben Roberts, Group CTIO at Liquid Intelligent Technologies. Post to X on Sunday afternoon Seacom and EASSy cables were reporting simultaneous failures.
According to a report by the BBC, the fault occurred 45 kilometers north of Durban and sabotage has been ruled out as a cause at this stage.
The outage caused a spike in outage reports on the network problem reporting site Downdetector. Netflix, DStv, Telkom, Vumatel, and several other service providers saw an apparent spike in outage reports on their sites from around 16:00 on May 12th, but around 22:00 that evening. The situation subsided.
While Downdetector does not provide reporting services in East African countries, Netblocks, another Internet outage reporting company, reports that the Seacom cable cut incident has a high impact in Tanzania and Mayotte, and a medium impact in Mozambique and Malawi. It showed that there was.
? CONFIRMED: Network data indicates internet connectivity issues in and around multiple regions in the East. #Africa Country. The incident is believed to be caused by a fault affecting the SEACOM and EASSY submarine cable systems. pic.twitter.com/8TsAvKrOe6
— NetBlocks (@netblocks) May 12, 2024
The Seacom cable was already damaged in the Red Sea in February, and repair efforts are believed to be hampered by political instability in the region. However, it is still possible to flow traffic through unaffected parts of the cable, meaning South Africa can connect to East African countries.
Undersea cables enable the rapid transfer of information over long distances, making the Internet possible. When a cable is damaged, all traffic that would have flowed along that cable must be rerouted to another cable.
However, in some regions, there are not many cables connecting the country to the world, so the impact of a service outage can be severe.
The east coast cable damage did not cause as much of a spike in outage reports in South Africa as when four undersea cables snapped on the continent's west coast in early March.
Read more | It's not just you – Multiple undersea cables snap, causing massive internet outage in South Africa
For several hours on March 14, nearly all internet services were dramatically affected as a result of faults likely occurring as a result of seismic activity.
Bayobab, head of MTN's infrastructure department, told News24 on Friday that they can confirm that the ACE, WACS and SAT-3 cables have been repaired and are fully operational. MainOne also confirmed on Friday that the undersea cable had been repaired.
This means that repair work on all affected cables on the West Coast was completed several days before the new outage occurred on the East Coast.
The cause of the East Coast cable failure has not yet been announced, nor has an expected repair schedule been disclosed.