Inevitable Internet Outage Cripples a Lot of African Nations
A major internet disruption has been experienced by millions of people in about a dozen African countries today – Thursday. This came about as a result of essentially the internet being down; either it was slow or didn’t exist at all. The power failure was blamed on the cable inefficiency that came after disruptions in the undersea telecommunications cable systems covering the western and southern parts of the continent.
It has been discovered through MTN Group, one of Africa’s leading telecoms brands, that the cable cutoffs and the resulting disruptions are due to various breaches taking place among different major undersea cables. The above South African company Twitter announcement had it that “RTS has made arrangements for re-routing traffic through alternative network paths ……with the perpetrators involved”.
Internet watchdog NetBlocks characterized the disruption in Nordic countries as among the most critical ones recently in the world. Isik Mater, Director of Research at the tech company reported “signals patterns whose frequency indicates a “major break” in the pattern of international traffic, probably at or very near the subsea network control and entry points.”
The cause of cable failures is still unknown, but the effects of that witnessed on an unfortunate note have been widespread. For example, Ivory Coast is one of the countries that faced the more severe disruption, therefore, there are more likely to occur of service interruptions of critical needs like health care and education. Mobile device web traffic in Africa occupies the throne of the world’s number one position, and the majority of businesses rely significantly on the Internet to serve their clients.
Cables such as the West Africa Cable System (WACS) and the Africa Coast to Europe (ACE) are said to be among the most prominent in the region. SAT-3 and MainOne are also high on the list. The internet analysis group Cloudflare has discovered a pattern in the timing of the blocking of those sites, which all happened in the morning in at least 10 West African countries, including Ivory Coast, Liberia, Benin, Ghana, and Burkina Faso, and may have been done to prevent people from gathering any information on the situation.
Vodacom, the South African mobile operator, reported on the disruptions too, stating that they were “due to multiple undersea cable failures that are hitting various nations including Namibia and Lesotho, among others.” Already under this stress, as networks redirect around the damage they can cause, so the impact on the system is increased even further meaning there can be less available capacity left for other countries, Mater warned.
Telecommunication services and internet providers are redoubling their efforts in this Oscar-worthy effort of theirs to re-establish serviceability but the extent of the damage as characterized by cables hauling data through fiber optics cables is not easily determined.
