West and Central Africa had been hit with internet disruption last Thursday, as reported by the internet observatory Netblocks, cited information from operators indicating multiple subsea cable failures.
According to Netblocks data, Ivory Coast faced a severe outage, while Liberia, Benin, Ghana, and Burkina Faso experienced significant impacts. Cloudflare, an internet firm, confirmed ongoing major disruptions in Gambia, Guinea, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Benin, and Niger through one of its monitoring accounts.
The internet outages happened at different times all over Africa. People might have to wait for about five weeks for the internet to work properly again, says The National Communication Authority (NCA) on Saturday, March 16, 2024, after a meeting with the four subsea cable landing service providers (ACE, MainOne, SAT-3 and WACS).
It comes three days after data services from most of the telecommunications companies shut down, impacting people and businesses in some African countries.
According to NCA, the subsea cable landing service providers have remotely identified the approximate locations of the damage and are readying to dispatch repair vessels to assess them.
“Based on the above, the subsea cable landing service providers have indicated an estimated time frame of a minimum of five (5) weeks for full service restoration from the time the vessels are dispatched to the various locations,” NCA stated.
NCA added that it “recognizes the impact the disruptions have had on economic, academic and
social activities and assures the public of its commitment to continue collaborating with relevant stakeholders.”
On the back of this, the Authority is looking forward to “some improvement in data services in the coming
days while the operators work around the clock to restore full connectivity.”
SOURCE: africanews.com / myjoyonline.com