Five things to know about internet outages caused by undersea cable cuts

Nigerians, including telecoms companies, banks and media, were hit by internet outages on Thursday due to damage to international undersea cables that provide them with connectivity.

The Nigerian government confirmed the incident, saying the damage affected the main submarine cable near Abidjan, Ivory Coast, and caused a shutdown in the West and South African countries.

Reuben Muoka, director of public affairs at the Nigeria Communications Commission (NCC), said in a statement that signal reductions were occurring in some areas of Côte d’Ivoire and Senegal, with Portugal also affected.

The West African Cable System (WACS) and African Coast to Europe (ACE) cable companies on the West Coast routes from Europe experienced outages, while SAT3 and MainOne experienced outages, the report said.

The regulator added that similar submarine cables that provide traffic from Europe to the east coast of Africa, such as Seacom, Europe India Gateway (EIG) and Asia-Africa-Europe 1 (AAE1), are said to have been severed at around some point in time. Red Sea.

This is said to have resulted in reduced service quality on these routes.

Here’s some important information about internet outages.

1).Reason for network outage

MainOne Networks, which provides internet services to much of west and southern Africa, said in a statement on Friday at 0743 GMT on Thursday, March 14, that its network experienced an outage, which an investigation revealed was due to a glitch. Caused. External events occurred that resulted in a “failure of its undersea cable system in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Côte d’Ivoire, which has also affected other cable systems and is disrupting international connectivity and internet services to countries in West Africa.”

2). How long will the outage last?

It explained that the MainOne submarine cable carries a significant portion of international traffic in West Africa and provides services to multiple countries, so the impact is significant.

The company said it has a maintenance agreement with “Atlantic Cable Maintenance and Repair Agreement (ACMA) to provide repair services for submarine cables.”

The service provider added that the steps to be taken include first identifying and assigning a vessel to retrieve the necessary spare parts required for repairs and then sailing to the location of the failure to carry out the repair work.

It is said that in order to complete the repair work in the next step, the affected submarine cable sections must be pulled from the seabed to the ship and spliced ​​by skilled technicians.

“Once repaired, the joints will be inspected and tested for any defects, before the subsea cable is returned to the seafloor and guided to a suitable location. This process may take 1-2 weeks for repairs, and once the ship is mobilized, it may take approximately 2 -3 weeks transit time to receive spare parts and travel from Europe to West Africa.”

3).Causes of power outage at sea

The report adds that most submarine cable failures are caused by human activities, such as fishing and anchoring in shallow nearshore waters, as well as natural disasters such as earthquakes, landslides, and equipment failures.

“Given the distance from land and the fact that the cable depth at the fault point is approximately 3 kilometers, any type of human activity, anchoring, fishing, drilling, etc. has been immediately ruled out.

“Our preliminary analysis suggests that some form of seismic activity on the seafloor caused the cable to break, but we will have more data when the cable is recovered during the repair process.”

The company said it is working with the Atlantic Cable Maintenance and Repair Agreement (ACMA), which will deploy the vessel, but could not provide further information at this time.

4). What does it mean to customers?

The service provider noted that international services on the cable south of the landing site in Senegal were disrupted.

The company said this resulted in an interruption in internet service for most customers.

Also read: Undersea cable cut: MainOne provides more information, says some customer service has been restored

“We recognize the impact of power outages and are working tirelessly to provide recovery capabilities for temporary relief where feasible.

“While we do have some pre-provisioned resilience on other cable systems, unfortunately those cable systems are also currently down. We have since acquired capacity on the cable systems available, but we have not yet found readily available capacity to fully restore service to all customers.”

5). MainOne declares force majeure

The company also declared force majeure, exempting it from its contractual obligations to customers in certain circumstances.

It said commercial contracts often contain such force majeure clauses, enabling service providers to suspend contractual obligations during such disruptions.

The company said it was working to provide repair services to as many customers as possible and complete repairs to the cable system in record time.

“Following testing of the cable system, MainOne declared a force majeure event when we obtained sufficient technical data from a preliminary assessment to suggest that certain underwater activity may have been the cause.

“We believe that, given the severity of the situation, it is important that customers are informed of the details of the fault so that expectations can be set and contingency arrangements can be made during the repair process.”

MainOne has a number of recovery agreements in place with other carriers, but unfortunately, those cable systems are also currently affected by the outage, the statement said.

“We believe the severity of the impact is driven by the fact that our submarine cables carry the majority of international traffic into West Africa and serve multiple countries.

“We are actively working to restore services where possible and are mobilizing a vessel for repairs and will update as soon as we have more details.”

According to the statement, MainOne cables are well protected, as evidenced by the number of incidents involving our cable systems since their introduction in 2010.

“We have pioneered support in West Africa by supporting the International Cable Protection Council (ICPC) and organizing submarine cable owners associations in Nigeria and Ghana, which have raised awareness of the strategic benefits of submarine cables and introduced proactive regulations and measures to maximize Reduce damage to submarine cables.

“We are very optimistic that our cables will be repaired as planned and services will be fully restored so that we can continue operations with the continued integrity of our subsea cables,” the company said.