A dozen countries across Africa suffered a major internet outage on Thursday as multiple undersea telecommunication cables reported failures, network operators and internet watch groups said.
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.
Internet analysis firm Cloudflare reported a pattern in the timing of the disruptions that heavily impacted at least 10 countries in West Africa, including Ivory Coast, Liberia, Benin, Ghana, and Burkina Faso.
Others are Niger, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Gabon.
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Vodacom, South Africa’s mobile operator, also reported “intermittent connectivity issues due to multiple undersea cable failures.” Namibia and Lesotho were also affected.
Nigerians also suffered a halt in Internet services as people cried for transactions as well as operations.
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.
WASHINGTON POST