Many countries in Africa deprived of internet due to submarine cable breakage: repair will take five weeks

About 99% of Internet traffic between continents travels through submarine cableFiber optic cables which have high installation and maintenance costs.

Ghanaian officials revealed it will take at least five weeks to restore internet services in the country as well as a dozen others after it was affected African nation caused disruptions since last Thursday due to damage submarine cable,

“Landing Service Provider submarine cable Ghana’s National Communications Authority (NCA) said in a statement reported late Saturday by local media that it had “remotely identified the approximate locations of the damage and is preparing to dispatch repair vessels to the location.”

In another statement this Friday, the NCA highlighted that mobile network operators and submarine cable “Continue to work with international partners in the subregion whose cables have not been affected by the outage” to provide Internet,

Last Thursday, the NetBlocks portal warned of “major disruptions” in connectivity Internet in a dozen countries, mainly in the West and Center Africa,

The greatest damage occurred in Ivory Coast, Liberia, Benin, Ghana, Burkina Faso and Togo, although others including Mauritius, South Africa and Lesotho also suffered outages.

“This incident affects the networks that provide telecommunications submarine cable For multiple countries and operators,” NetBlocks said.

Thus, the main cable systems supplying the region were cut, including MainOne, West African Cable System (WASC), Africa Coast to Europe (ACE) and SAT-3.

Human intervention ruled out in cable breakage

On Saturday, MainOne (owned by the US company Equinix) explained in a statement that “given the distance from land at the damaged point and the depth of the cable of about 3 kilometres, any type of human activity – anchoring of boats, fishing , drilling, etc. – are immediately rejected.

“Our initial analysis suggests that this may have resulted from some type of seismic activity on the sea floor cable breakageBut we will know more when the cable is recovered during repair work,” the operator said.

One of the telecom companies affected by the outage and the largest operator in the region AfricaSouth African MTN assured via social network X on Friday that it was working to “immediately mitigate the impact of the damage by diverting traffic”.

about 99% traffic Internet passes between continents submarine cable Fiber optics which have high installation and maintenance costs. efe