Ivory Coast, Liberia, Benin, Ghana, and Burkina Faso are among the countries experiencing outages
Large parts of West and Central Africa are without internet service as operators of several subsea cables have reported failures.
The cause of the cable failures on Thursday is not yet clear.
Seacom, the African subsea cable operator, confirmed that services on its West African cable system were down. Customers relying on that cable are being redirected to the Google Equiano cable, which Seacom uses.
“The redirection happens automatically when a route is impacted,” Seacom stated in an email.
Network disruptions due to cable damage have been frequent in Africa in recent years. However, the current disruption is considered one of the most severe, according to Isik Mater, director of research at NetBlocks, a group that monitors internet disruptions globally.
NetBlocks reported significant disruption to international data transmission and measurement, indicating that the issue likely occurred at or near the landing points of the subsea network cables.
The internet outage in west and central Africa has had a significant impact, affecting at least a dozen countries. In countries like Ivory Coast, the disruption has been severe, raising concerns about potential disruptions to essential services. This region has a higher proportion of internet traffic on mobile devices compared to other continents, highlighting the importance of internet connectivity for businesses to deliver services to their customers.
According to data from NetBlocks, countries like Liberia, Benin, Ghana, and Burkina Faso have also experienced heavy disruptions. The internet infrastructure company Cloudflare has noted major ongoing internet disruptions in several countries, including the Gambia, Guinea, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Benin, and Niger.
Namibia and Lesotho were also impacted by the internet outage.
Cloudflare Radar noted a pattern in the timing of the disruptions, affecting countries from the north to the south of Africa.
Vodacom, a South African telecoms operator, also attributed connectivity issues to undersea cable failures affecting network providers in South Africa.
As networks try to reroute around the damage, the impact of such cable failures can worsen, potentially reducing the available capacity for other countries, Mater explained. She added that while the initial disruption might be a physical cut, subsequent issues could be of a technical nature.