Tanzania was badly affected when East African countries were hit by a major internet outage throughout Sunday, May 12, 2024.
Apparently reports say two submarine cables experienced major faults over the weekend.
The fiber optic cable that connects South Africa to Kenya and Tanzanian coastline experienced faults on Sunday.
The Eassy and Seacom cable systems that run along Africa’s east coast were damaged, leading to a nearly total internet blackout in some areas of Kenya and Tanzania, with Rwanda, Uganda and Madagascar also impacted.
Social media reports suggest that users on major networks and internet service providers, including Airtel, Halotel, Tigo and Vodacom in Tanzania as well as Safaricom and Telkom Kenya, have been affected.
Some data users in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania experienced total internet blackouts on Sunday.
Others suffered the slowest data speeds on record and kept lamenting the ordeal on social media platforms.
It wasn’t just East Africa; countries such as Malawi, Mozambique and Madagascar have also been affected according to Cloudflare Radar.
An expert from the pan-Africa company Liquid Intelligent Technologies, revealed that the firm had confirmed that one cable that runs alongside the coast of East Africa, known as Eassy, had been cut earlier on Sunday some 45km (28 miles) north of the South African port city of Durban.
Another cable was also cut. He ruled out the idea that it could be sabotage and said it was rather an unhappy coincidence.
Other cables linking East Africa to Europe are also available and gradually the service should improve as data is re-routed. But as a lot of big companies have data centers in South Africa the damage to the vital link that Eassy provides had a big impact.
The cause of the faults is unknown, but the fact that both systems went off at the same time suggests an undersea event, similar to the one that severed four cables off Ivory Coast in West Africa in mid-March.
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