Large parts of West Africa have poor internet access due to damaged submarine cables

Much of Africa's west coast has been hit by an internet outage caused by damage to an undersea submarine cable. At least three cables are broken, meaning that eight countries with millions of inhabitants barely have any internet access.

The countries of Libya, Benin, Ghana and Burkina Faso, among others, are suffering from the outage, writes Cloudflare, among others. Internet traffic in these countries has fallen sharply since Thursday evening. In some cases, these outages appear to have been resolved, but that is partly because traffic from cables is redirected to other internet cables, such as Google's Equiano cable used by providers such as Seacom.

According to Netblocks, which monitors internet outages the cause of the disruption lies in various internet cables located under the sea. These include the West Africa Cable System and the South Atlantic Cable System cables, the latter of which runs to South Africa. That country is also affected by the disruption. Furthermore, the MainOne and the Africa Coast to Europe cable do not appear to be working properly, although none of the administrators report any problems.

According to analysts such as Netblocks, it could take weeks before full internet connectivity is restored in the region. In the meantime, many internet connections are being rerouted via other cables, but this could cause additional problems because those cables may have to handle too much network traffic, analysts warn. The cause of the cable damage is not yet known. Earlier this year, a key undersea internet cable in the Red Sea was damaged, forcing much network traffic between Europe and Africa and Asia to be rerouted via alternative cables.

Source: Netblocks on X