Big Internet cable break repairs almost finished
Repairs on the Eastern Africa Submarine System (EASSy) cable are underway, and traffic is expected to return by the morning of Friday, 24 May 2024.
This is according to the West Indian Ocean Cable Company (Wiocc), which also said that while no clear cause has been identified regarding the break, the damage was consistent with a heavy object being dragged over it.
Orange Marine’s Léon Thévenin was tasked with repairing the cable break. It departed Cape Town Harbour on Tuesday, 14 May, for the site of the faults on the EASSy cable.
The ship was operating just off the East coast of South Africa, close to the Mtunzini cable landing station between Durban and Richard’s Bay.
The Léon Thévenin can tackle repairs in water as shallow as 10 metres or as deep as 7km.
It is equipped with various tools, including grapnels, buoys, ropes, and dead weights, designed to assist with cable work.
It also has a remotely operated vehicle that is used to detect, cut, recover, join, and test undersea fibre cables.
Faults on the EASSy and Seacom subsea cables off the east coast of Africa were reported on Tuesday, 14 May 2024. The incident knocked out all subsea capacity between East Africa and South Africa.
The EASSy cable is 10,000km long and connects Eastern Africa to the rest of the world. It serves as a critical telecommunications component, carrying the region’s voice, data, video, and Internet traffic.
Companies like Netblock and Cloudflare noticed that Internet connectivity in the region had taken a hit.
Netblock, a watchdog organisation monitoring cybersecurity and Internet governance, observed disruptions to Internet connectivity in and around East Africa.
At the same time, Cloudflare reported that the faults had impacted connectivity to Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, and Tanzania.
It observed traffic drops of between 30% and 75% in affected countries.
Seacom is still suffering from a cable break in the Red Sea that can’t be repaired due to Houthi rebel activity in the region.
Following the cable faults, South African users complained about buffering on Netflix and trouble connecting to other online services.
However, the submarine cable breaks appear to have been only part of the problem.
INX-ZA chair Edrich de Lange told MyBroadband that several terrestrial cable failures also occurred, reducing capacity between Johannesburg and Cape Town.
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