Undersea cable breaks knock out internet access

South Africans were plunged into internet darkness on Thursday as multiple breaks in undersea fibre cables connecting SA’s online traffic to the rest of the world resulted in outages for the country. 

The outage saw disruptions for both mobile and fibre internet access. 

Fibre network operator Seacom confirmed an outage on the West Africa Cable System (WACS) on the day, saying its services on that cable had been impacted. The undersea fibre provider has redirected its customers on that cable to the Google-backed Equiano cable that it has a stake in, “ensuring uninterrupted services to our clients and continued traffic flow.”

Despite the challenges on WACS, “services remain robust and fully operational, without any congestion on its links that aggregate client traffic”, the company said in statement. 

Undersea cables periodically have breaks or disruptions to service. However, companies such as Seacom tend to have mechanisms in place to route internet and other communication traffic to alternative cables to minimise disruption to service for consumers and businesses. 

Founded in 2009, Seacom connects SA’s internet traffic to Europe via its eastern African undersea cable and holds about 25% of the wholesale fibre market locally, competing with firms such as Telkom, Vodacom and Liquid Intelligent Technologies.

SA’s largest fibre operator Openserve said its services had been impacted by failures on the WACS and South Atlantic 3 (SAT-3) cables. The Telkom subsidiary said the impact on its network was limited to customers on the international private leases circuits services.

“The Openserve network remains robust due to our investment in other international cable capacity, hence traffic has been automatically rerouted, ensuring our customers stay seamlessly connected,” it said.

Internet service provider Cool Ideas told its customers that its network was a “loss and latency issue” for all international traffic, down to “multiple breaks on undersea cables causing saturation on the remaining cables.”

Undersea cable operators like Seacom specialise in providing open access to in land fibre providers such as Openserve, Metrofibre and Vumatel, which give open access networks to ISPs. Service providers such as Cool Ideas, RocketNet and WebAfrica tend to not have their own fibre assets, relying on network operators like Openserve or Vox’s Frogfoot to reach homes and businesses.

Mobile operators also make use of the same undersea infrastructure to connect to the rest of the world. 

SA’s largest mobile operator Vodacom said “certain customers are currently experiencing intermittent connectivity issues due to multiple undersea cable failures affecting SA’s network providers, including us”.

In addition to network operators and ISP, Downdetector, the network monitoring site saw an in outage reports about services like WhatsApp, X and Microsoft on the day. 

This comes a few weeks after Seacom 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. 

gavazam@businesslive.co.za