Internet outage — Cables believed broken in deep ocean, will take at least five weeks to fix

Submarine fibre cable operator MainOne has said its preliminary analysis points to seismic activity on the seabed causing a break in its submarine fibre cable last week.

Four undersea telecommunications cables went offline around the same time on Thursday, 14 March 2024 — the West Africa Cable System (WACS), Africa Coast to Europe (ACE), MainOne, and SAT–3.

The disruptions were traced to the coast of Cote d’Ivoire, near Abidjan.

These outages caused major Internet disruptions across the continent, including South Africa.

“Given the distance from land and the cable depth of about 3km at the point of fault, any kind of human activity — ship anchors, fishing, drilling, etc. has been immediately ruled out,” MainOne said.

“We will obtain more data when the cable is retrieved during the repair exercise.”

The U.S. Geological Survey did not detect any earthquakes in the vicinity of the cable breaks last week. However, this does not rule out other possible activity on the seabed.

Due to the depth, MainOne has all but ruled out sabotage.

Ghana’s communications regulator told Reuters that repairing the damaged cables would take at least five weeks.

It met with the four subsea cables’ landing service providers and mobile operators, who provided the regulator with the estimated repair time.

African undersea cables (2023). By Steve Song / ManyPossibilities.net

The cable cuts caused Microsoft’s cloud region in South Africa to go offline on Thursday.

Vodacom’s data network also became unavailable for many subscribers.

In South Africa, Vodacom restored services within an hour or so, while Microsoft’s cloud platforms only started coming back online at around midnight.

The Microsoft outage caused severe disruptions as many organisations could not access their e-mail or conduct meetings over Teams.

Those relying on Microsoft’s cloud region in South Africa were also severely impacted.

Payments provider Yoco uses Microsoft Azure and said its services were disrupted due to the outage.

Microsoft noted that cable cuts in the Red Sea — Seacom, EIG, and AAE–1 — also impacted overall capacity on the East coast of Africa.

A Houthi attack was blamed for these East coast cable breaks, as rebels shot Belizian fertiliser ship The Rubymar with ballistic missiles off the west coast of Yemen in mid-February.

It is believed the ship dropped an anchor, which was dragged along the seafloor as it drifted after the crew abandoned the vessel.

“These incidents together had reduced the total network capacity for most of Africa’s regions,” Microsoft said.

“This resulted in downstream impact to dependent Azure services, which may have experienced degradation and availability issues.”

In the meantime, Microsoft has mitigated the issue by rerouting traffic and expanding its capacity in South Africa on alternative undersea cables.

Even before the root cause of the outage was confirmed, the cable consortiums jointly mobilised a cable ship.

They did not confirm which vessel had been dispatched.

However, Marine Traffic shows that the cable layer Sophie Germain is en route from the Port of La Seyne-sur-Mer in Toulon, France to an undisclosed construction site.