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.
Ivory Coast was experiencing a severe outage, while 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.
“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.
More details soon …