A part of Africa cut off from the world.
An outage affected several submarine cables on Thursday, providing Internet to West and Central Africa, BFMTV reported, based on data from the Internet observatory Netblocks.
Major Internet disruption ongoing in west/central Africa.
Gambia, Guinea, and Liberia with a disruption at 5:00 UTC.
Ivory Coast, Ghana, Benin at 7:30 UTC.
Niger at 9:15 UTC.https://t.co/NHN1Aat9Ql pic.twitter.com/9oQFdhMJC1
— Cloudflare Radar (@CloudflareRadar) March 14, 2024
Ivory Coast was the most affected country, according to Netblocks, but Liberia, Benin, Ghana and Burkina Faso were also affected.
“Major disruptions” were also observed in Gambia, Guinea, and Niger, Internet company Cloudflare reported on X (formerly Twitter).
The cause of the failure unknown
“There appears to be a trend in the timing of disruptions, impacting from north to south of Africa,” noted this company, specifying that outages first affected Gambia, Guinea and Liberia at 5 a.m. GMT (6 a.m. French time), before affecting Ivory Coast, Ghana, and Benin at 7:30 a.m. (8:30 a.m. in France), then Niger at 9:15 a.m. (10:15 a.m. in France).
The cause of these outages has not yet been identified.
Submarine cable operator SEACOM has confirmed that its cable system in West Africa is experiencing an outage, and affected customers are being redirected to another cable.
“Redirection is done automatically when a route is impacted,” he told Reuters.