The West Africa Cable System (WACS) has been repaired after it was damaged in a suspected undersea landslide that impacted four cables off the West coast of Africa earlier this year.
First reported by Total Telecom, the WACS cable is the third of the four impacted cables to be restored, with only one cable, MainOne, now awaiting repair.
The damage to the four cables - WACS, MainOne, SAT-3, and ACE - caused outages across the continent.
The 14,530 km (9028 miles) WACS cable spans from Portugal to South Africa, with 13 landing points in 12 countries across the West coast of Africa. The WACS cable also provides connectivity from Portugal to the UK via dedicated fiber pairs on an existing cable.
Last month, the Orange Marine Leon Thevenin cable ship repaired the SAT-3 cable and whilst there was no official announcement, the ACE cable is now also operational.
The final cable to be repaired will be the MainOne cable, expected to be serviced by the C.S Sovereign.
Customers impacted by the cable damage included 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. Services were restored after the impacted companies secured additional capacity on operational undersea cables, such as Google’s Equiano cable.
