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A major internet breakdown struck West and Central Africa yesterday, according to the report by the internet observatory Netblocks, which monitors internet status across the world. This was mostly attributed to multiple subsea cable failures. The precise cause of these failures remains unclear at this time
A major internet breakdown struck West and Central Africa yesterday, according to the report by the internet observatory Netblocks, which monitors internet status across the world. This was mostly attributed to multiple subsea cable failures. The precise cause of these failures remains unclear at this time.
Ivory Coast faced a severe outage. Liberia, Benin, Ghana, and Burkina Faso experienced significant impacts. Cloudflare, an internet firm, confirmed ongoing major disruptions in Gambia, Guinea, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Benin, and Niger through one of its monitoring accounts.
Cloudflare Radar noted a discernible pattern in the timing of these disruptions, affecting regions from the north to the south of Africa. South African telecoms operator Vodacom also attributed connectivity issues to undersea cable failures impacting the country’s network providers.
Africa mostly depends on the Internet on submarine cables, which carry 90% of the internet load. Including intercontinental traffic load. Only a small percentage of general use is done via satellite networks. There are 529 active submarine cables and 1,444 landings that are currently active or under construction, covering 1.3 million km around the globe.
Reports from several local networks, including South Africa’s Vodacom, MTN in Nigeria, and Celtiis in Bénin, reference multiple submarine cable failures. Microsoft was more detailed, stating on their Azure status page that “multiple fiber cables on the West Coast of Africa — WACS, MainOne, SAT3, ACE — have been impacted which reduced total capacity supporting our Regions in South Africa.In addition to the impacts on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform, the website of MainOne, owners of the MainOne submarine cable, was offline for several hours.
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The Internet Observatory informs NetBlocks reporting and the wider human rights community using measurement, classification, and attribution techniques to detect internet disruptions, online censorship and cyber-attacks on critical infrastructure in the defence of human rights, democratic process and digital prosperity. The programme integrates first-party and third-party data sources to deliver a unified view of connectivity and platform reachability during crises, elections, civic mobilisation as well as weather and seismic events that can impact human rights and democracy.
