Nigeria, Other African Countries Affected, As Undersea Cable Damages Crash Telcos, Banks’ Networks 

A combination of cable cuts, resulting in equipment faults on the major undersea cables along the West African Coast, have negatively impacted data and fixed telecom services in several countries of West Africa, including Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, Cote de Ivoire, among others.

Reuben Muoka, Director, Public Affairs of the Nigerian Communication Commissions (NCC) disclosed that the cuts occurred somewhere in Cote d’Ivoire and Senegal, with an attendant disruption in Portugal.

Cable companies – West African Cable System (WACS) and African Coast to Europe (ACE) in the West Coast route from Europe have experienced faults while SAT3 and MainOne have downtime.

Similar undersea cables providing traffic from Europe to the East Coast of Africa, like Seacom, Europe India Gateway (EIG), Asia-Africa-Europe 1 (AAE1), are said to have been cut at some point around the Red Sea, resulting in degradation of services across on these routes.

In Nigeria and other West African countries, Internet access and speed have experienced disruptions in the networks of service providers in the affected countries.

Muoka however informed that operators of these cables have commenced repairs already, and services are gradually being restored, adding that they have promised to work round the clock to ensure that services are restored to the affected countries within the shortest possible time.

As a result of this incident, telecommunications companies and banks in Nigeria and other African countries, particularly those within the East & West Africa sub-regions, were hit on Thursday by an internet outage and some bank networks in Nigeria were down and unable to process transactions as a result of the internet outage.

Telecom subscribers of all the four networks also complained of poor data experience since Thursday morning.

In response to its customers’ complaints over the poor internet connectivity being experienced, MTN in a statement issued to explain the cause, said “We apologize for the challenges you may be experiencing with internet speed and accessing data services at the moment.

“This is a result of damage to international undersea cables across East & West Africa. The repair process is ongoing to resolve the situation as soon as possible. Please look out for further updates.”

It was gathered the problem was not peculiar to Nigeria as other African Countries, such as South Africa suffered similar network failure.

According to reports from local media, the cable damage has also caused a massive internet problem in South Africa.

South African publication, My Broadband reported that WIOCC group business development head Darren Bedford confirmed that multiple undersea cables operating along Africa’s West coast are experiencing outages.

Bedford said their capacity on the Equiano cable had not been impacted. WIOCC also has capacity on the East cost EASSy cable. Due to this redundant capacity, Bedford said the outage will not impact their customers.

Vodacom, one of South Africa’s telecom operators, has also confirmed the undersea cable outages, stating, “Multiple undersea cable failures between South Africa and Europe are currently impacting South Africa’s network providers, including Vodacom.

“This means that certain customers are currently experiencing intermittent connectivity issues. We apologize for the inconvenience this may cause and thank you for your patience while the issue is being attended to,” the company stated.