Orange Marine cable ship Leon Thevenin has arrived at the site of one of the four major undersea cable breaks off Côte d'Ivoire.

On March 14th, outages were reported across the coast of West Africa after multiple cables were damaged in a suspected undersea landslide. The four cables impacted are WACS, MainOne, SAT-3, and ACE.

The Leon Thevenin, reported by MyBroadband to have set sail on March 19th, will only attend the SAT-3 break, having reached the fault area at the end of March.

The Telekom-controlled SAT-3 cable offers much less capacity than its damaged counterparts. However, C.S Sovereign is expected to arrive by 8 April to fix the MainOne, WACS, and ACE cables.

SAT-3, expected to be repaired by the second week of April, has 12 landing points spanning from Portugal to South Africa.

The ACE and WACS cables are expected to be restored on 17 April and 28 April, respectively. The MainOne cable will be the final cable to be repaired by 9 May.

Customers impacted by the cable damage include Mweb, Openserve, Seacom, Telkom, Vodacom, Vumatel, and Vox.

The cable breaks caused an estimated two-hour outage on Vodacom’s data network in South Africa. The Microsoft Azure region in South Africa was also offline for several hours. Microsoft’s locally hosted cloud services were also affected, such as Teams, Outlook, and Microsoft 365 services.

Services were restored after the impacted companies secured additional capacity on operational undersea cables, such as Google’s Equiano cable.