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A major internet disruption was on Sunday experienced across East Africa following a undersea cable cut.
Telecom giants MTN Uganda said in a statement on Sunday that connectivity and internet services to much of the East African region of Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and South Sudan, have been impacted due to an undersea cable cut.
“This may result in our esteemed customers experiencing slower internet speeds and a general degraded service when accessing online services like Microsoft 365, Twitter, WhatsApp, Microsoft Teams among others,” MTN Uganda said.
According to reports, all sub-sea capacity between the two regions was severely affecting internet service providers across the region.
The cause of the cable failures was not immediately clear to the frustration of millions of customers around East and South Africa
Ben Roberts, Group CTIO at Liquid Intelligent Technologies, in a post on X, faults have been reported in the Eastern Africa Submarine Cable System (EASSy) and the Seacom cables.
Roberts adds that three crucial submarine cables in the Red Sea Seacom, EIG, and AAE1 have also suffered cuts and remain unrepaired, leading to the widespread outage.
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The latest cable problems appear to severe impact on internet users in Kenya and Tanzania with social media reports suggesting a near total internet blackout in some areas.
This is the second time Africa has experienced a major fibre cut this year. In March, a suspected underwater rock slid off the coast of Cote d’Ivoire resulting in several submarine cables being offline.
The cables included ACE – Africa Coast to Europe, SAT-3 – Submarine Atlantic 3/West Africa Submarine Cable, WACS – West Africa Cable System and MainOne.
The outage impacted 13 African countries located on the West African seaboard, causing either degraded services or near-total Internet outages.
Four of the nine subsea cables that connect countries like South Africa to the rest of the world were reported as damaged due to incidents on either side of the continent.
During this time internet infrastructure in the affected countries also experienced significant issues.
In Kenya, this latest outage seems to have affected service providers like Safaricom, Airtel and Telkom Kenya. Safaricom said has since activated.
Telecoms at the weekend scrambled to inform frustrated clients that they were working with it partners to resolve the issue as soon as possible
Source ; Nile Post.co.ug