•Banks, other service providers denied access
A major Internet disruption hit West and Central Africa, yesterday, the Internet observatory, Netblocks said, citing reports from operators of multiple subsea cable failures.
While the cause of the cable failures was not immediately clear, Ivory Coast, Nigeria experienced severe outages, while Liberia, Benin, Ghana and Burkina Faso saw a high impact.
Reuters noted that Internet firm, Cloud Flare, said on one of its X accounts that monitor trends that major Internet disruptions were ongoing in Gambia, Guinea, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Benin and Niger.
“There seems to be a pattern in the timing of disruptions, impacting from the north to the south of Africa,” Cloud flare Radar said.
South African telecoms operator, Vodafone also blamed connectivity issues on undersea cable failures affecting the country’s network providers.
It was, however, gathered that the outage in Nigeria was as a result of fibre cut in Ghana. Specifically, it was gathered that MainOne Ghana suffered a fibre cut, which led to Internet service disruption in Nigeria and environs.
Sources within the InfraCo confirmed that banks and subscribers of some network operators in Nigeria have lamented Internet downtime for the majority of yesterday. It was gathered as at press time that the company was currently working to resolve the challenge.
Some subscribers were neither able to browse the Internet nor have access to Yahoo, Twitter and other platforms. Africa is reported to have about 600 million Internet users with Nigeria having over 150 million as of 2023.
Recall that some weeks back, telecommunications firm, MTN also suffered fibre cuts, which caused its customers to experience hitches accessing the Internet.
MTN said: “Our customers have been experiencing challenges connecting to the network due to major service outages caused by multiple fibre cuts, affecting voice and data services.
“Our engineers are working hard to resolve it with services gradually being restored in some areas.” Yesterday as well, a statement from Bayobab Group acknowledged connectivity disruptions due to undersea cable damage, which resulted in connectivity issues in several West African countries.
Bayobab, a subsidiary of MTN, said in recognition of the critical importance of consistent Internet and communication services: “we are fully committed to swiftly addressing these disruptions.
“To mitigate the impact on our customers in the affected countries, our operations are actively working to reroute traffic through alternative network paths and engaging with our consortium partners to expedite the repair process for the damaged cables. Leveraging our robust and resilient network infrastructure, we aim to maintain service interruptions and maintain connectivity.”
THEGUARDIAN
