{"id":536373,"date":"2024-05-12T20:23:15","date_gmt":"2024-05-12T18:23:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/?p=536373"},"modified":"2024-08-23T07:57:08","modified_gmt":"2024-08-23T05:57:08","slug":"big-internet-cable-faults-cause-connectivity-problems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/internet\/536373-big-internet-cable-faults-cause-connectivity-problems.html","title":{"rendered":"Big Internet cable faults cause connectivity problems"},"content":{"rendered":"

Internet connectivity in South Africa has been hit by submarine cable faults off the East coast of Africa.<\/p>\n

Liquid Intelligent Technologies group CTIO Ben Roberts confirmed<\/a><\/strong> on Twitter that all subsea capacity between East Africa and South Africa was offline.<\/p>\n

While South African users were complaining about poor Netflix performance and issues with some other online services, Roberts said Internet services to East Africa were severely impaired.<\/p>\n

Roberts said there was a confirmed fault on the EASSy cable and that they were observing a fault on the Seacom cable that occurred at the same time.<\/p>\n

EASSy is a 10,000km undersea fibre optic cable system connecting countries in Eastern Africa to the rest of the world.<\/p>\n

The cable is a core telecommunications component carrying the region’s voice, data, video, and internet traffic.<\/p>\n

BBC reported<\/a><\/strong> that there was a fault on Seacom.\u00a0 Seacom offers fibre-optic pairs from Mtunzini in South Africa to a point of presence (PoP) in Marseille.<\/p>\n

The report quoted Roberts as saying they had ruled out sabotage and that both cables going down was an unfortunate coincidence.<\/p>\n

Roberts also reported that a triple cable cut in the Red Sea impacting Seacom, EIG, and AAE1 remains unrepaired. The cables were likely damaged by a ship’s anchor after it was attacked by Houthi rebels<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

According to Downdetector<\/a><\/strong>, South African Internet users have been reporting issues with various online services since around 17:00.<\/p>\n

Some tech-savvy users also reported that their Netflix traffic was coming from international servers rather than the ones in South Africa.<\/p>\n

Major Internet exchange point NAPAfrica also shows a major dip in traffic around 17:00.<\/p>\n

Internet observatory Netblocks said network data show a disruption to internet connectivity in and around multiple East African countries.<\/p>\n

“The incident is attributed to failures affecting the Seacom and EASSY subsea cable systems,” it said.<\/p>\n

Tanzania’s minister of information, communication, and IT released a statement saying the disruptions are caused by cable faults between Mozambique and South Africa.<\/p>\n

Cloudflare added that faults on EASSy and Seacom cables are impacting Internet connectivity to Tanzania, Malawi, Mozambique, and Madagascar.<\/p>\n

The company added that traffic dropped between 30% and 75% in impacted countries.<\/p>\n

This outage comes shortly after the repair<\/a><\/strong> of a quadruple cable break in West Africa off the coast of C\u00f4te d’Ivoire near Abidjan, which disrupted traffic between South Africa and Europe.<\/p>\n

The faults occurred on 14 March and impacted the West Africa Cable System (WACS), Sat-3, Africa Coast to Europe (ACE), and MainOne.<\/p>\n

According to MainOne, the breaks were caused by a submarine landslide.<\/p>\n

Repairs to Sat-3 were completed in early April, while a second cable ship was dispatched to repair the other three cables.<\/p>\n

The ACE cable was repaired on 17 April 2024. WACS suffered two breaks, which were repaired on 30 April. MainOne announced that its cable was repaired on 10 May.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

NAPAfrica traffic dip followed by recovery on 12 May 2024<\/p><\/div>\n

Downdetector South Africa \u2014 12 May 2024<\/h2>\n
\"\"<\/a>

Downdetector recorded a surge in complaints from South African Internet users on 12 May 2024<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

All submarine cable capacity between East Africa and South Africa is down.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":529143,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[31898,39162,18736,35,68978,6673,317,441,20395],"class_list":["post-536373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-internet","tag-africa-coast-to-europe-ace","tag-ben-roberts","tag-eastern-africa-submarine-cable-system-eassy","tag-headline","tag-liquid-intelligent-technologies-lit","tag-napafrica","tag-seacom","tag-teraco","tag-west-africa-cable-system-wacs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/536373"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=536373"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/536373\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":556897,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/536373\/revisions\/556897"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/529143"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=536373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=536373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=536373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}