South Africa struggled with widespread internet disruptions on Thursday as multiple undersea cable breaks wreaked havoc on the country’s connectivity.
Vodacom spokesman Byron Kennedy confirmed to TechCentral that the internet disruptions stemmed from undersea cable failures between South Africa and Europe, affecting various network providers including Vodacom. The incident, reported at 2:22 PM on Thursday, underscored the severity of the situation.
Reports from multiple sources indicated that an undersea incident had occurred, impacting several cables along Africa’s west coast. Microsoft revealed that four cables had been affected by the disruptions.
Speculation suggested that the cable breaks might have originated off the coast of Abidjan, the capital of Ivory Coast in West Africa. South Africa’s internet connectivity heavily relies on main cables traversing the west coast of Africa, such as the West Africa Cable System (Wacs) and Google’s Equiano cable.
The cables identified by Microsoft as affected included Wacs, MainOne, Sat-3, and Ace.
This marks the second occurrence in seven months of a significant cable break along Africa’s coastline severely affecting internet services in South Africa.
The timing of the latest outage exacerbates the situation, coinciding with the recent severance of the Seacom cable, which links South Africa to Europe along Africa’s east coast, potentially due to a ship’s anchor. Repairs to the Seacom cable face delays due to geopolitical instability in the region.
While Seacom confirmed to TechCentral that the Wacs cable, carrying its traffic, is down, it also noted that internet traffic is still flowing via the Equiano system. This development offers a glimmer of hope as it enables the diversion of a substantial portion of west coast internet traffic from affected cables.
Microsoft’s acknowledgment of reduced capacity supporting its Azure data center regions in South Africa, particularly South Africa North and South Africa West, further underscores the magnitude of the disruptions. Many organizations reported encountering difficulties accessing Microsoft services, including Teams, during the outage.
Microsoft’s data center regions in South Africa, situated in Gauteng and the Western Cape, serve as vital hubs for digital operations in the region.
As South Africa grapples with the fallout from these undersea cable breaks, stakeholders are bracing for continued challenges in internet connectivity until repairs are completed and normalcy is restored to the network infrastructure.
