Major Internet Outage In EA As Subsea Cables Fail

If you’ve been flipping the switch on your router in an attempt to switch it on and off again to get it to bleed some Wi-Fi, take heart. It’s not your ISP. The Internet to East Africa, tweets Ben Roberts, Group CTIO Liquid Intelligent Technologies, “is severely impaired.”

He added, “All sub-sea capacity between East Africa and South Africa is down.” With the EASSy cable fault confirmed and the Seacom cable “observing fault that occurred at the same time.” To amplify the failure, three cable cuts that occurred in the Red Sea (Seacom, EIG, AAE1), he reports, “further remain unrepaired.”

This comes almost two months after the 14 March 2024 Internet outage, which severely affected Africa. At the time, Cloudflare stated, “This series of disruptions serves as a reminder of how dependent the Internet is on submarine cables, which are estimated to carry over 90 per cent of intercontinental data traffic. It turns out that only a small percentage of general use is done via satellite networks, and there are, in fact, 529 active submarine cables and 1,444 landings that are currently active or under construction, running to an estimated 1.3 million km around the globe.

The Kenya to South Africa connectivity, stated Roberts, “Remains critical to connect to hyperscale cloud in South Africa. This is why AWS, Microsoft, Google, and Oracle have all previously announced the launch of public cloud in the region.”

As the issue is currently under resolution and we await further details, we are reminded that undersea cables are vital for internet connectivity and the digital economy, it is evident that the recent damage highlights their importance and the need for diversification.