Internet Blackout continues to affect 80 Million users in nine countries of Eastern Africa Region
This time, 25 years ago nobody cared whether there was internet or not. But recent outtage of data communication has just frozen activities in the entire Eastern African Region.
Ongoing internet outage affecting East African countries is impacting over 80 million users across multiple countries.
The data and voice blackout was caused by a cable break approximately 42 kilometers from the Mtunzini Cable Landing Station.
Mtunzini is a pivotal docking point for the South Africa Far East (SAFE) and Eastern Africa Submarine Cable System (EASSy) cables.
The Mtunzini Cable Landing Station is located at about 120 kilometers north of Durban, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.
Repair teams have been swiftly mobilized and optimization efforts are underway to mitigate disrupted services but work is expected to commence later this week.
Wiocc which is an investor in the EASSy cable system confirmed a cut in the EASSy cable between South Africa and Mozambique.
Mtunzini Cable Landing Station is owned and operated by Telkom South Africa, while another cable landing station in Mtunzini owned by Liquid Telecom (Neotel) serves as a landing point for the SEACOM cable.
EASSy boasts a vital 10,000-kilometer undersea line along the eastern coastline of Africa with nine landing stations in Sudan, Djibouti, Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, Comoros, Madagascar, Mozambique and South Africa.
This extensive system serves as the backbone for internet connectivity for at least 12 landlocked nations and facilitates wide coverage across East Africa.
The ongoing outage has also been partly attributed to damage to the SEACOM cable, a 17,000-kilometer submarine cable connecting South Africa, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, Djibouti, France and India.
Previous damage to subsea cables, including Seacom, EIG, and AAE-1, in the Red Sea connecting Africa and Southeast Asia to Europe, remains unrepaired.
These cables sustained damage in February after a ship dropped its anchor on them.
The following is a current situation and workaround:
Mobilization of cable ship from Cape Town with team of engineers to fix the cut is ongoing. The Estimated time for resolution is approximately six (6) days.
Presently, most local providers in Tanzania are utilizing the Zantel and Tigo secondary link via Madagascar Island.
The other Mitigation step taken to minimize Impact include rerouting internet through Mobamza via Kisumu-Mwanza and Arusha – Namanga.
20G is what is available and LSP routing creation is ongoing and we can see internet traffic building up now.
This is to allow CDN (Cache) to work but the 20G will be congested because normal capacity usage is 60G
Meanwhile people are able to access the internet, but it is very slow especially for computer users. Slightly better on mobile platforms such as Whatsapp, but not for video call.