Respite as Internet Services Improve in Nigeria, Others

By Adedapo Adesanya

There have been improvements in internet services in Nigeria and other parts of the African continent after three days of disruptions.

Attacks on more than three subsea cables off the West Coast of Africa disrupted internet services in Nigeria, Ghana, and other countries across the continent. While the impact was low in Nigeria and Ghana, the effect was high in Cote d’Ivoire.

Telecommunications subscribers, television stations, and banks were impacted and over the week, the disruption paralysed digital transactions and internet communications.

Among the affected infrastructure were African submarine cables such as South Atlantic Telecommunications cable no.3 (SAT-3), MainOne Cable System, West Africa Cable System (WACS), and Africa Coast to Europe (ACE) on the West Coast of Africa to Europe.

Also, other undersea cables on the East Coast of Africa to Europe such as Seacom/TGN, AAE1, EIG, and others are all cut in the Red Sea.

MainOne, which is owned by data center operator, Equinix, said that an “external incident” resulted in a cut to its cable system in the Atlantic Ocean, offshore Cote D’Ivoire along the coast of West Africa and ruled out human activity as the cause.

“Our preliminary analysis would suggest some form of seismic activity on the seabed resulted in a break to the cable”, MainOne said, adding it would obtain more data when the cable is retrieved during repair.

“Given the distance from land, and the cable depth of about 3 kms (1.86 miles) at the point of fault, any kind of human activity – ship anchors, fishing, drilling, etc has been immediately ruled out,” it said.

Africa has a higher proportion of its internet traffic on mobile devices than any other continent, with many of its businesses relying on the internet to deliver services to their customers.

Apart from Nigeria, Liberia, Benin, Ghana, and Burkina Faso were heavily affected, according to data from Netblocks, which monitors cybersecurity and the governance of the internet.

The internet infrastructure company, Cloudflare, said in a post on X that major internet disruption was continuing in the Gambia, Guinea, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Benin and Niger. Namibia and Lesotho were also affected.

A Ghanaian resident, identified as Kaygah, told Business Post that the internet is seeing an improvement as customers who relied on the damaged cable were being redirected to other alternatives.