Internet Outage Hits West and Central African Countries: Who’s Affected?
The NetBlocks observatory for monitoring the Internet stated on Thursday that a major Internet connection outage had struck West and Central Africa, based on reports from telecommunications companies indicating issues with undersea cables.
The cause of the outages affecting the cables was not immediately clear, according to Reuters.
The company operating the African undersea cables (SEACOM) confirmed the disruption of services to the cable system in West Africa, redirecting clients dependent on this system to a cable (Google Equiano) used by the company.
The company stated via email: “The redirection process occurs automatically when one of the cables is affected.”
NetBlocks data showed that Ivory Coast experienced severe disruption, while Liberia, Benin, and Burkina Faso were also affected.
Cloudflare, a company monitoring Internet activity, stated on one of its accounts on the “X” website that significant Internet disruptions continued in Gambia, Guinea, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Benin, and Niger.
Cloudflare Radar stated: “There appears to be a pattern in the timing of outages affecting Africa from North to South.”
Telecommunications company Vodacom in South Africa stated that undersea cable outages had affected the country’s Internet service providers.
