Submarine Cable Outage:
Internet Downtime for West Africa

On Thursday, March 14, 2024, at 7:43 GMT, the region of West Africa experienced an unexpected network disruption. The cause? A fault in the submarine cable system that runs along the Atlantic coast off the Ivory Coast in West Africa. Preliminary investigations revealed that an external event led to a cut in our submarine cable.

It is expected that the repair work on the damaged cable will take approximately 1-2 weeks. Additionally, the ship conducting the repair will require approximately 2-3 weeks for transit from Europe to West Africa. Therefore, it is likely that users will be disconnected from the services for a period of at least 5 weeks.

Ongoing uncertainty

The exact cause of the cable break remains unclear for now. However, it is believed that the event was caused by seismic activity on the seabed, although further data collection is needed to confirm this assumption.
Given the depth of the cable of approximately 3 km and its location far from the shore, it seems unlikely that the cut was intentionally caused. However, investigations are ongoing to ensure that all possible causes are ruled out.

Impact on West Africa

The disruption of international services south of Senegal has far-reaching effects on the population. A significant portion of users is affected by an outage of internet services. Intensive efforts are being made to provide temporary capacity for partial restoration where possible.

Some countries in West and Central Africa are particularly affected, including Ivory Coast, Liberia, Benin, Ghana, and Burkina Faso. There are concerns that essential services in these regions could be affected.

Despite the declaration of Force Majeure by the parties involved, every effort is being made to restore services as quickly as possible. These events underscore the necessity of redundancy plans and proactive measures to safeguard critical infrastructure and minimize the impacts of such disruptions.

What is a submarine cable and why is it so important?

Learn more about the crucial role of submarine cables in our global communication network, here: The Infrastructure of The Internet
Discover how these cables transport data across oceans and why they are essential for the stability and speed of the Internet.