Major undersea cable cut causes internet disruptions across East Africa
Several internet service providers across East and South Africa have suffered outages following a submarine cable cut on Sunday. According to reports, all sub-sea capacity between the two regions have severely been affected.
Details about the fibre cut are still unclear but according to Ben Roberts, Group CTIO at Liquid Intelligent Technologies, in a post on X, faults have been reported in the Eastern Africa Submarine Cable System (EASSy) and the Seacom cables.
Ben adds that three crucial submarine cables in the Red Sea — Seacom, EIG, and AAE1 — have also suffered cuts and remain unrepaired, leading to the widespread outage.
This is the second time Africa has experienced a major fibre cut this year. In March, a suspected underwater rock slid off the coast of Cote d’Ivoire resulting in several submarine cables being offline. The cables included ACE – Africa Coast to Europe, SAT-3 – Submarine Atlantic 3/West Africa Submarine Cable, WACS – West Africa Cable System and MainOne.
The outage impacted 13 African countries located on the West African seaboard, causing either degraded services or near-total Internet outages.
Four of the nine subsea cables that connect countries like South Africa to the rest of the world were reported as damaged due to incidents on either side of the continent.
During this time internet infrastructure in the affected countries also experienced significant issues.
In Kenya, this latest outage seems to have affected service providers like Safaricom, Airtel and Telkom Kenya. Safaricom said has since activated redundancy measures to minimise service interruption and keep users connected.
”We have experienced an outage on one of the undersea cables that deliver internet traffic in and out of the country. We have since activated redundancy measures to minimise service interruption and keep you connected as we await the full restoration of the cable. You may, however, experience reduced internet speeds.” the telco said.
Users have reported slow internet connections for both Fibre to the Home (FTTH) and mobile data.
This latest development underscores the vulnerabilities of submarine cables, which are critical infrastructures for internet connectivity across continents. Other East African countries affected by the cut are Tanzania, Burundi, Uganda, and Rwanda.
