Ivory Coast is working to restore the Internet, affected since the day before by a major outage affecting several African countries, the government counting on normalization by Saturday but speaking of a week for the repair of the underlying cables. sailors, presented as the origin of the problem.
A “crisis unit” and an “interministerial committee” are at work “in order to monitor the evolution of the situation and ensure the restoration of the service as soon as possible”, assured the Ivorian Ministry of Transition digital.
“At the local level, all appropriate measures are being taken to carry out the necessary repairs,” he added.
A single operator is not affected
The country's two largest operators, Orange (subsidiary of the French operator) and MTN (subsidiary of the South African group), are affected, disrupting all daily life, particularly economic and banking.
Only the third mobile operator, the Moroccan Moov, is operating normally, and in Abidjan, unusual queues formed in front of the Moov agencies which were to remain open until 8 p.m. this Friday to buy and recharge SIM cards.
The outage began Thursday morning, and during the night from Thursday to Friday, only 3% of Ivorian Internet users had a connection, according to the NGO NetBlocks which identified the severity of the outage depending on the country.
According to data published overnight from Thursday to Friday, in addition to Ivory Coast, the most affected countries were, in order, Liberia, Ghana, Benin, Burkina Faso, Mauritius and Togo.
⚠️ Update: Metrics show the West and Central #Africa telecoms outage is ongoing, with further declines in connectivity observed to multiple countries through the day;
the incident is attributed to cable damage impacting the WACS, MainOne, SAT3 and ACE subsea fiber networks 📉 pic.twitter.com/UW36sKay6J
— NetBlocks (@netblocks) March 14, 2024
The outage was less severe in other countries, Cameroon, Gabon, Namibia and Rwanda.
In South Africa, affected yesterday, the connection was generally restored on Friday.
“Road works” in Abidjan
In a press release sent to AFP on Friday, the Ivorian Ministry of Digital Transition reported “strong disruptions to internet service throughout the national territory”, linked according to it to “unusual cable cuts which occurred both at the local level due to road works” in Abidjan and “at the international level on several submarine cables”.
Thursday evening, the Director General of Digital Transformation within the ministry, Olivier Avoa, specified on national television that four out of five of the submarine cables which allow Côte d'Ivoire to have access to the internet "have suffered damage". incidents”.
INTERNET BREAK IN IVORY COAST 🇨🇮
OLIVIER AVOA, DG OF DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION AND DIGITALIZATION:
“Out of 5 submarine cables serving Ivory Coast, 4 cables were cut.
Only the MOOV operator cable escaped.
While waiting to find a… pic.twitter.com/wBgUO5o3hu
— varan🐊 2.0 🇨🇮⭐️⭐️⭐️🙏 (@luca_varan) March 14, 2024
Each operator uses a cable, and “the only cable that has not been cut is that of Moov Africa,” he added.
Efforts are being made “so that by tomorrow or 48 hours (Saturday evening) things return to normal,” he added.
The majority of internet traffic passes through the world via submarine fiber optic cables, one of which, 15,000 km long, leaves Portugal to connect Cape Town to South Africa.
For its part, the Ivorian branch of the South African group MTN wrote on Friday on X that the connection was “partially restored”, specifying that “the work undertaken” is “continuing”.