Parts of SA and East Africa experienced internet disruptions over the weekend and into Monday after a break in undersea fibre cables.
According to a BBC report, the fault happened 45km north of Durban. Sabotage has been ruled out as a cause, for now.
Prenesh Padayachee, group chief digital and operations officer at Seacom, confirmed the outage, saying the fibre network operator’s core points of presence (POP) in Maputo and Dar es Salaam “are currently down due to a cable break”.
“The Seacom technical teams are currently working with the vendors on restoring services to these regions. Traffic out of SA is being routed via alternative cable west coast cable systems.”
Seacom has had to deal with a number of undersea cable breaks in recent months.
In February, the operator said it was unsure when it would be able to fully repair a break in one of its undersea cable systems in the contentious Red Sea, with the damage having affected some businesses in east and Southern Africa.
The next month saw widespread outages caused by failures on the west coast cables — specifically the WACS and South Atlantic 3 (SAT-3) cables.
Estimating the cost of an internet outage can be difficult, especially sudden and sporadic incidents caused by undersea cable breaks.
Undersea cables periodically have breaks or disruptions to service. However, companies such as Seacom tend to have mechanisms in place to route internet and communications traffic to alternative cables to minimise disruptions to consumers and businesses.
That said, Top10vpn, an international VPN review website, estimates that government-induced internet shutdowns — a different yet equally disruptive form of outage — resulted in a global economic loss of more than $9bn in 2023, affecting 747-million people. The report estimates that Sub-Saharan Africa lost $1.74bn of that.
For SA, a type of outages that have become more common are those caused by load-shedding.
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