Microsoft has informed customers that repairs to four undersea cables that went offline around noon on Thursday have been delayed.<\/p>\n
In the meantime, the company has re-routed traffic to restore functionality of its cloud platforms in South Africa.<\/p>\n
This comes after a massive outage in C\u00f4te d\u2019Ivoire near Abidjan took down the West Africa Cable System (WACS), the Africa Coast to Europe (ACE), MainOne, and SAT\u20133 cables.<\/p>\n
It is unclear what caused the disruption.<\/p>\n
“Investigations are being undertaken on behalf of the subsea cable system owners and we are unable to confirm any further details,” a WIOCC spokesperson told MyBroadband.<\/p>\n
WIOCC is a major player in the African undersea cable space, with its history tracing back to the launch of the East coast cable system EASSy in 2010.<\/p>\n
It has since significantly expanded its operations to cover multiple cables and data centres on the continent.<\/p>\n
“Our focus at this time is on restoring the clients we have using these systems onto other subsea systems on which we own capacity, including EASSy and Equiano.”<\/p>\n
Telkom’s wholesale and networks division Openserve also couldn’t comment on what caused the outage.<\/p>\n
“No official statement has been communicated by the consortium,” it said.<\/p>\n
“Openserve can confirm the cable failures on the WACS and SAT-3 undersea cables. The impact on Openserve is limited to customers on the international private lease circuits (IPLC) services.<\/p>\n
“The Openserve network remains robust due to our investment in other international cable capacity, hence traffic has been automatically re-routed, ensuring customers stay seamlessly connected.”<\/p>\n
Microsoft assured customers last night that it would have a mitigation in place by midnight South African time.<\/p>\n
\u201cEfforts to re-route traffic to healthy infrastructure have been successful in providing service-side relief to many users,\u201d Microsoft said<\/a><\/strong> at 22:35.<\/p>\n Just before 01:00, Microsoft said its analysis indicates that users should no longer be experiencing service issues.<\/p>\n \u201cOur remediation to ensure impact doesn\u2019t reoccur will be completed by March 15, 2024, at 2:00 AM UTC,\u201d it added.<\/p>\n However, at just before 05:00, Microsoft said there were delays to its plan to resolve the issue.<\/p>\n