Outages are being reported along the western coast of Africa after multiple cables were damaged.
“Live network data show a major disruption to Internet connectivity in and around West and Central Africa,” Internet monitoring firm NetBlocks said today. “The incident affects networks supplying telecoms via subsea cables to multiple countries and operators.”
MyBroadband reports the downtime is being caused by multiple outages on undersea cables near Abidjan in Côte d’Ivoire.
The SAT-3/West Africa Cable System (WACS), the Africa Coast to Europe (ACE), and other cables are affected. The outage started around 12:30 on Thursday, 14 March 2024.
“Multiple undersea cable failures between South Africa and Europe are currently impacting South Africa’s network providers, including Vodacom,” a Vodacom spokesperson told TechCentral.
Seacom has also reportedly confirmed to TC that the WACS cable has been affected.
Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis at Kentik, indicated there were also issues with the MainOne subsea cable.
Microsoft is reporting network latency issues in its South Africa North and South Africa West locations.
“Starting at 10:30 UTC on 14 Mar 2024, customers using Azure Services in South Africa North and South Africa West may experience increased network latency or packet drops when accessing their resources,” the company said.
"We have determined that multiple fiber cables on the West Coast of Africa — WACS, MainOne, SAT3, ACE — have been impacted which reduced total capacity supporting our Regions in South Africa," Microsoft said in an update. "In addition to these cable impacts, the on-going cable cuts in the Red Sea — EIG, Seacom, AAE-1 — are also impacting capacity on the East Coast of Africa. This combination of incidents has impacted all Africa capacity – including other Cloud providers and public Internet as well."
Other impacted customers include Mweb, Openserve, Seacom, Telkom, Vodacom, Vumatel, and Vox. Microsoft customer payment provider Yoco is also facing issues, as is service provider ISSC Group.
"Certain customers are currently experiencing intermittent connectivity issues due to multiple undersea cable failures affecting SA's network providers, including us," Vodacom said. "We apologize for any inconvenience caused."
DCD will update this story as more information becomes available
