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South Africa saw numerous vital networks fail in 2024 due to undersea cable breaks, leaving many businesses without the necessary technical infrastructure to function.
The most severe of these cable outages occurred on 14 March, causing a Vodacom data network outage and a Microsoft Azure outage.
The outage started at around 12:30 on Thursday, 14 March 2024, and MyBroadband soon learned that four undersea cables had suffered near simultaneous outages off the coast of Abidjan in Côte d’Ivoire.
These cables were the West Africa Cable System (WACS), the Africa Coast to Europe (ACE), MainOne, and SAT3. MainOne is the only cable that does not extend to South Africa.
According to MainOne, the breaks were caused by a submarine landslide.
This Microsoft Azure disruption affected Microsoft Office 365 customers around the country, who complained that they could not access their cloud-hosted services.
Downdetector said that 76,000 people reported the issue across Africa and the Middle East.
Microsoft later confirmed that the multiple cable outages reduced the total capacity supporting its regions in South Africa.
Similarly, Vodacom subscribers around South Africa could not access the Internet for several hours, with even local sites offline.
While Vodacom and Microsoft were the most severely affected by the cable breaks, Downdetector showed a significant spike in reports of issues on websites, apps, and network providers that offer data services.
These services included FNB, LinkedIn, Microsoft Teams, WhatsApp, X (Twitter), and Xbox.
Many broadband users, including Mweb, Openserve, Seacom, Telkom, Vodacom, Vumatel, and Vox subscribers, also reported problems with their Internet access.
The outage left Google’s Equiano as the only cable able to provide capacity to several West African nations.
Roughly a month later, the Eastern Africa Submarine System (EASSy) and Seacom suffered an outage.
This took down all subsea capacity between East Africa and South Africa.
EASSy is a 10,000 km submarine cable system along the east coast of Africa, with nine landing stations in Sudan, Djibouti, Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, Comoros, Madagascar, Mozambique and South Africa.
The cable is a core telecommunications component carrying the region’s voice, data, video, and internet traffic.
Seacom offers fibre-optic pairs from Mtunzini in South Africa to a point of presence in Marseille. When it launched in 2009, it was the first submarine cable to compete against Telkom’s SAT-3 in South Africa.
The May 2024 outage came just two months after Seacom, along with two other telecommunications cables, had suffered a break in the Red Sea believed to be caused by an attack on a ship by Houthi militants.
Liquid Intelligent Technologies group CTIO Ben Roberts said at the time that these breaks had remained unrepaired, which could have contributed to the Seacom outage.
Fortunately for South Africa, the cable breaks affecting WACS, SAT-3, and ACE had been repaired just two weeks before EASSy and Seacom went down.
source:Undersea cable outages that hammered South African networks – MyBroadband
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