NEWS
Internet disruption: NCC confirms ongoing repair on undersea cables
The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has reported that repair work is currently underway to address the undersea cables that were damaged. These cuts led to equipment malfunctions in key undersea cables along the West African Coast last Thursday, leading to disruptions in internet services.
Earlier reports indicated that an internet outage occurred on Thursday afternoon across several West African countries, including Nigeria. The cause of the outage, as reportted by NCC was attributed to damage sustained by at least three undersea – subsea cables in the region.
On Thursday, the West Africa Cable System, MainOne, and ACE sea cables experienced disruptions, causing outages and connectivity problems for mobile operators and internet service providers in the region.
On Friday, MainOne reported that a cut to its cable system in the Atlantic Ocean, offshore Cote D’Ivoire along the coast of West Africa, was caused by a “external incident.” The company has ruled out human activity as the cause of the disruption.
“Our preliminary analysis would suggest some form of seismic activity on the seabed resulted in a break to the cable”, MainOne said, adding it would obtain more data when the cable is retrieved during repair.
“Given the distance from land, and the cable depth of about 3 kms (1.86 miles) at the point of fault, any kind of human activity – ship anchors, fishing, drilling etc has been immediately ruled out,” Reuters quoted MainOne as saying.
The incident has negatively impacted data and fixed telecom services in several countries of West Africa, including Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, Côte D’Ivoire, among others.
However, the NCC in a statement said that operators of the damaged cables had commenced repairs, noting that internet services were gradually being restored.
“Cable companies – West African Cable System (WACS) and African Coast to Europe (ACE) in the West Coast route from Europe have experienced faults while SAT3 and MainOne have downtime.
“Similar undersea cables providing traffic from Europe to the East Coast of Africa, like Seacom, Europe India Gateway (EIG), Asia-Africa-Europe 1 (AAE1), are said to have been cut at some point around the Red Sea, resulting in degradation of services across on these routes.
“In Nigeria and other West African countries, Internet access and speed have experienced disruptions in the networks of service providers in the affected countries,” the NCC said in the statement.
