We previously reported that the internet outage on Thursday afternoon, which affected West African countries including Nigeria, was caused by damage to at least three undersea cables in the region.
The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has stated that repairs are underway on the undersea cable cuts that resulted in equipment defects on the major undersea cables along the West African coast on Thursday, causing internet service outage.
We previously reported that the internet outage on Thursday afternoon, which affected West African countries including Nigeria, was caused by damage to at least three undersea cables in the region.
The West Africa Cable System, MainOne, and ACE sea cables – arteries for telecommunications data — were all disrupted on Thursday, causing outages and connection concerns for mobile carriers and internet service providers in the region.
MainOne on Friday said that an “external incident” resulted in a cut to its cable system in the Atlantic Ocean, offshore Cote D’Ivoire along the coast of West Africa, ruling out human activity as a cause.
“Our preliminary analysis would suggest some form of seismic activity on the seabed resulted in a break to the cable”, MainOne said, adding it would obtain more data when the cable is retrieved during repair.
“Given the distance from land, and the cable depth of about 3 kms (1.86 miles) at the point of fault, any kind of human activity – ship anchors, fishing, drilling etc has been immediately ruled out,” Reuters quoted MainOne as saying.
The incident has negatively impacted data and fixed telecom services in several countries of West Africa, including Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, Côte D’Ivoire, among others.
However, the NCC in a statement said that operators of the damaged cables had commenced repairs, noting that internet services were gradually being restored.
“Cable companies – West African Cable System (WACS) and African Coast to Europe (ACE) in the West Coast route from Europe have experienced faults while SAT3 and MainOne have downtime.
“Similar undersea cables providing traffic from Europe to the East Coast of Africa, like Seacom, Europe India Gateway (EIG), Asia-Africa-Europe 1 (AAE1), are said to have been cut at some point around the Red Sea, resulting in degradation of services across on these routes.
“In Nigeria and other West African countries, Internet access and speed have experienced disruptions in the networks of service providers in the affected countries,” the NCC said in the statement.