http://www.seacom.mu/news/article-132/message-from-ceo-23-march/
Message from CEO – 23 March
As SEACOM has indicated in previous communications, multiple cable systems continue to be affected across Africa, the Middle East and Asia. I know that many of you are keen to know the cause of the outage is a physical cable cut some kilometres north of the coast of Egypt in the Mediterranean Sea. This is not likely to be known until the cable is repaired in the coming week or two and the damaged section is recovered from the seabed and inspected. However we suspect, based on our experience with sub-sea systems and the nature of the sea area where the cut has occurred, that the most likely cause is external aggression to the cable most probably caused by a larger vessel dragging its anchor across the sea bed. Unfortunately this remains a common cause of damage to cable systems globally, despite our continued efforts to protect the cable with armour, burying, notifications to ships of cable location and exclusion zones.
The SEACOM team’s first focus at this time remains getting restoration services turned up and our resources are committed to that work. However, this process is proving much more complex and taking longer than we were initially told by our suppliers and would have expected. Whilst we believed we had secured adequate restoration capacity between Egypt and Europe yesterday (Friday), it has since eventuated during today that the physical capability to connect this capacity to our services in Europe is neither adequate nor stable enough. In addition the capacity that may be available is in a long line of activations requested by many carriers (and requiring many hundreds of Gb’s) and is not progressing at the rate we, or our customers, need.
SEACOM continues to push for activation as a priority, co-ordinating across a number of carriers internationally. However, as this is not providing solutions in the time frame we require, we are also actively seeking new restoration solutions. This will continue to take some time and we are not able to provide timeframes as yet on when services will be restored.
Please be assured that the SEACOM team is working hard to get our services back up as quickly as we can. We will continue to communicate directly to customers and post here as we have information for you.
With our sincerest apologies,
Mark Simpson
CEO, SEACOM
