Internet Disruptions: Five things we know about the undersea cable cut

The damage to multiple sea cables left the West African region and some parts of the Central Region experiencing a widespread internet blackout.

The outage which was the first of its kind on such a mass scale left millions of users in a huge dilemma as the disruption has significantly impacted businesses and disrupted the daily lives of citizens in the affected areas.

It is projected that full service will be restored within five weeks.

Aside from telecommunications companies, banks, and the media have been the worst affected.

The Nigerian government in a statement revealed the damage affects major undersea cables near Abidjan in Côte d’Ivoire and is causing downtime across West and South African countries.

The Nigeria Communications Commission (NCC) in a statement through its Director of Public Affairs, Reuben Muoka, said the cuts occurred somewhere in Cote d’Ivoire and Senegal, with an attendant disruption in Portugal.

Cable companies such as 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 had downtime.

The NCC also told Nigerians undersea cables providing traffic from Europe to the East Coast of Africa, like Seacom, Europe India Gateway (EIG), and Asia-Africa-Europe 1 (AAE1), were said to have been cut at some point around the Red Sea.

This, it said, resulted in the degradation of services across these routes.

According to Netblocks, here are the severity levels of affected countries

Ivory Coast: Severe, Liberia: High, Benin: High, Ghana: High, Burkina Faso: High, Togo: Medium, Cameroon: Medium, Gabon: Medium, Namibia: Medium, Niger: Medium, Nigeria: Low, Lesotho: Low and South Africa: Low.

Below are some key things to know about internet disruptions

1). Cause of the network outage

MainOne Network in a statement on Friday said it experienced a fault in its network and its investigation revealed that the fault occurred due to an external incident that resulted in a cut on its “submarine cable system in the Atlantic Ocean offshore Cote D’Ivoire, along the coast of West Africa, experienced a fault that has also affected other cable systems and is disrupting international connectivity and internet services to countries across West Africa.”

2). How long will the outage last?

While we are yet to know when this will be rectified, it was gathered that the MainOne submarine cable carries a huge portion of international traffic into West Africa and also provides to multiple countries hence the reason for the impact.

The company has also revealed there is a maintenance agreement with the “Atlantic Cable Maintenance and Repair Agreement (ACMA) to provide repair services for the submarine cable.”

The service provider in its statement noted that steps were been taken. But firstly they needed to identify and assign vessels to retrieve the necessary spare parts required for repairs and then the sailing tot he fault location to conduct the repair work.

It said that the next step to complete the repair, the affected section of the submarine cable will have to be pulled from the seabed onto the ship where it will be spliced by skilled technicians.

“Post repair, joints will be inspected and tested for any defects and then the submarine cable is lowered back to the seabed and guided to a good position. This process might take 1-2 weeks for repairs while about 2-3 weeks of transit time may be required for the vessel to pick up the spares and travel from Europe to West Africa once the vessel is mobilised,” it said.

3). The cause of the outage in the sea

It is predicted that the submarine cable fault could occur as a result of human activities such as fishing and anchoring in shallow waters near shore, natural hazards such as earthquakes, landslides, and then equipment failure.

“Given the distance from land, and the cable depth of about 3 km at the point of fault, any kind of human activity, ship anchors, fishing, drilling etc has been immediately ruled out.

“Our preliminary analysis would suggest some form of seismic activity on the seabed resulted in a break to the cable, but we will obtain more data when the cable is retrieved during the repair exercise.”

The company said it is working with Atlantic Cable Maintenance and Repair Agreement (ACMA) which will deploy the vessel and is unable to provide more information at this time.

4). What it means to customers

The service provider noted that international services on its cable south of the landing in Senegal have been disrupted.

This, it said has resulted in the outage of internet services for the majority of its customers.

“We recognize the impact of the outage and are working tirelessly to make available restoration capacity for temporary relief, where feasible.

“While we do have some pre-configured restoration capacity on other cable systems, unfortunately, those cable systems are also down currently. We have since acquired capacity on available cable systems, but we have not found readily available capacity to fully restore services to all our customers,” it said.

5). MainOne declares a force majeure

The company also declared a force majeure which absorbs it from contractual obligations to its customers.

It said that commercial contracts typically included such a force majeure clause which enabled service providers to suspend contractual obligations for the duration of such disruptions, according to Premium Times.

The company said it is working to provide restoration services to as many of our customers as possible and to complete the repairs to the cable system in record time.

“MainOne declared a force majeure event subsequent to testing of the cable system and when we had enough technical data from the preliminary assessment to indicate some underwater activity was the likely cause.

“We believe it is important to inform our customers of the fault details given the magnitude of the situation in order to set expectations and make contingency arrangements while the repairs are ongoing.”

The statement said MainOne has some restoration agreements with other operators but unfortunately, those cable systems are also impacted by outages at this time.

“We believe our submarine cable carries a significant portion of the international traffic into West Africa and provides services to multiple countries hence the magnitude of the impact.