A damage to submarine cables has caused internet outages in Nigeria and some other countries in Africa.
The submarine cable cuts, on Thursday, affected subsea cable providers and disrupted internet traffic in major parts of the continent.
According to reports, the damage affected major undersea cables near Abidjan in Côte d’Ivoire, affecting submarine communications cables, including West Africa Cable System (WACS), the Africa Coast to Europe (ACE), MainOne, and SAT3.
The issue is said to be causing downtime across West and South African countries, affecting telecommunications network as well as banks in Nigeria.
MainOne, whose facilities provide internet services to many parts of western and southern Africa said the repairs of the undersea cables cut may take about 5 weeks to be completed.
In a notice to customers on Thursday, Some Banks apologised to customers over the effect of the network disruption affecting transactions.
MTN Group, Africa’s largest telecommunications provider, also said its services in several West African countries have been disrupted.
In a statement on Thursday, the telco giant said the ongoing disconnection experienced by its customers is due to breaks in multiple major undersea cables.
Following the sudden cable disruptions, numerous have Nigerians have been frustrated with the internet outage.
The development has triggered outages and connectivity issues for mobile operators and internet service providers
According to information gathered by DAILY GIST from Netblocks, below are the severity levels of affected countries
Ivory Coast: Severe
Liberia: High
Benin: High
Ghana: High
Burkina Faso: High
Togo: Medium
Cameroon: Medium
Gabon: Medium
Namibia: Medium
Niger: Medium
Nigeria: Low
Lesotho: Low
South Africa: Low
However, the Nigerian Communications Commissions (NCC) has provided a new update on the development
The NCC in a statement said that operators of the damaged cables had commenced repairs, noting that internet services were gradually being restored.
“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,” the NCC said in the statement.
