On March 14th, defective undersea cables triggered African Internet outages, causing significant disruptions across several countries, as reported by operators across the continent. However, operations successfully rerouted the flow through alternative routes. The most affected nations, including Ivory Coast, Liberia, Benin, Ghana, and Burkina Faso, experienced severe interruptions. Others, such as Togo, Cameroon, Gabon, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, and South Africa, faced milder impacts.
In Ivory Coast, the two largest operators, Orange and MTN, bore the brunt of the outages, exacerbating the severity of the disruptions in the country. Meanwhile, the third operator, Moov, a subsidiary of the Maroc Telecom Group, remained operational.
These network disruptions, leading to African Internet outages due to damaged cables, have occurred in recent years, but this incident is considered one of the most significant. The consequences escalate as networks endeavor to address them by redirecting traffic, consequently diminishing capacities allocated to other countries. This underscores Africa’s heavy reliance on the internet for its economy.
Since the Russo-Ukrainian conflicts, the number of incidents has multiplied, and one wonders who or what is behind them ?
