Much of west and central Africa has been left without internet service, as operators of several subsea cables reported failures.
The cause of the cable failures on Thursday was not immediately clear.
The African subsea cable operator Seacom confirmed that services on its west African cable system were down and that customers who relied on that cable were being redirected to the Google Equiano cable, which Seacom uses.
“The redirection happens automatically when a route is impacted,” it said by email.
Network disruptions caused by cable damage have occurred in Africa in recent years. However, today’s disruption “points to something larger [and] this is amongst the most severe,” said Isik Mater, director of research at NetBlocks, a group that documents internet disruptions around the world.
NetBlocks said data transmission and measurement showed a major disruption to international transits, “likely at or near the subsea network cable landing points”.
At least a dozen countries have been affected by the outage, and there were fears of disruption of essential services in worst-hit states such as Ivory Coast, where the disruption was severe.
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.
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.
“There seems to be a pattern in the timing of the disruptions, impacting from the north to the south of Africa,” Cloudflare Radar said.
The South African telecoms operator Vodacom also blamed connectivity problems on undersea cable failures affecting South Africa’s network providers.
The impact from such cable failures worsens as networks attempt to route around the damage, potentially reducing the capacity available to other countries, said Mater.
“The initial disruption may be a physical cut, but subsequent issues could be of a technical nature,” she added.
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