Nigeria along with many other countries in Africa suffered a major internet outage on Thursday. Network operators and internet watch groups says the outage was as a result of reported failures in multiple undersea telecommunication cables.
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Internet watchdog NetBlocks said the internet connectivity disruption was across eight West African countries; Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Liberia, and the Benin Republic.
BBC in its report included other countries like South Africa and Burkina Faso.
In South Africa, Vodacom said that “customers are currently experiencing intermittent connectivity issues due to multiple undersea cable failures”. Namibia and Lesotho were also said to be affected.
A fault has also been reported on the MainOne cable system which serves Nigeria’s commercial hub, Lagos.
The MTN Group, one of Africa’s largest network providers, said the ongoing disruptions were a result of failures in multiple major undersea cables. “Our operations are actively working to reroute traffic through alternative network paths,” the South African company said in a statement.
MTN Nigeria confirmed the internet disruption, explaining that the network outage experienced by its subscribers was a “result of damage to international undersea cables across East & West Africa”.
“The repair process is ongoing to resolve the situation as soon as possible. Please look out for further updates,” Punch reported MTN Nigeria as saying.
NetBlocks reported that “live data show a major disruption to internet connectivity in and around West and Central Africa; the incident affects networks supplying telecoms via subsea cables to multiple countries and operators.”
⚠ Confirmed: Live network data show a major disruption to internet connectivity in and around West and Central #Africa; the incident affects networks supplying telecoms via subsea cables to multiple countries and operators 📉 pic.twitter.com/KOfGpjL7jz
— NetBlocks (@netblocks) March 14, 2024
In an updated report, NetBlocks said live network data show today’s telecoms disruption on the continent has intensified.
The impact from such cable failures worsens as networks attempt to route around the damage, potentially reducing the capacity available to other countries, said Mater with NetBlocks.
“The initial disruption may be a physical cut, but subsequent issues could be of a technical nature,” said Mater.
The West Africa Cable System (WACS), the Africa Coast to Europe (ACE), SAT-3 and MainOne were among the system cables that observers said were affected in Thursday’s outage.
The cause of the cable failures is not immediately clear.
