On Thursday, a significant internet disruption hit twelve African countries due to reported failures of several undersea telecommunication cables, according to various network operators and internet monitoring organizations.

The ongoing disruptions, as stated by the MTN Group, one of Africa’s largest network providers, are due to failures in multiple major undersea cables. In their statement, the South African company stated that their operations are currently redirecting traffic through other network paths.

In Africa, there have been instances of network interruptions due to damaged cables in recent times. However, according to Isik Mater, the director of research at NetBlocks, a group that monitors global internet disruptions, the current disruption is one of the most serious cases.

NetBlocks reported that the transmission of data and its measurement indicate a significant disturbance to international communication routes, possibly occurring at or close to the landing points for the subsea network cable.

The reason for the failure was not immediately evident.

There were concerns that essential services could be disrupted in countries heavily impacted by the pandemic, such as Ivory Coast where the impact was significant. Africa is the global leader in mobile web traffic, and many businesses in the region depend on the internet to provide services to their clients.

On Thursday, notable experts reported that the West Africa Cable System (WACS), the Africa Coast to Europe (ACE), SAT-3, and MainOne were among the submarine cables affected by the outage.

Cloudflare, a company that analyzes the internet, discovered a trend in the timing of the disruptions that significantly affected at least ten countries in West Africa such as Ivory Coast, Liberia, Benin, Ghana, and Burkina Faso.

The mobile operator of South Africa, Vodacom, noted problems with consistent connection due to various failures in the undersea cables. This issue also impacted Namibia and Lesotho.

According to NetBlocks’ Mater, cable failures can have a greater effect as networks try to find alternative routes, resulting in a potential decrease of available capacity for other nations.

Mater stated that while the initial disruption could be a physical cut, any further problems may pertain to technical issues.

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Source: wral.com