<
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/14/much-of-west-and-central-africa-without-internet-after-undersea-cable-failures>
"Much of west and central Africa has been left without internet service, as
operators of several subsea cables reported failures.
The cause of the cable failures on Thursday was not immediately clear.
The African subsea cable operator Seacom confirmed that services on its west
African cable system were down and that customers who relied on that cable were
being redirected to the Google Equiano cable, which Seacom uses.
“The redirection happens automatically when a route is impacted,” it said by
email.
Network disruptions caused by cable damage have occurred in Africa in recent
years. However, today’s disruption “points to something larger [and] this is
amongst the most severe,” said Isik Mater, director of research at NetBlocks, a
group that documents internet disruptions around the world.
NetBlocks said data transmission and measurement showed a major disruption to
international transits, “likely at or near the subsea network cable landing
points”.
At least a dozen countries have been affected by the outage, and there were
fears of disruption of essential services in worst-hit states such as Ivory
Coast, where the disruption was severe.
Africa has a higher proportion of its internet traffic on mobile devices than
any other continent, with many of its businesses relying on the internet to
deliver services to their customers.
Liberia, Benin, Ghana and Burkina Faso were heavily affected, according to data
from Netblocks, which monitors cybersecurity and the governance of the
internet.
The internet infrastructure company Cloudflare said in a post on X that major
internet disruption was continuing in the Gambia, Guinea, Liberia, Ivory Coast,
Ghana, Benin and Niger.
Namibia and Lesotho were also affected."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
