Internet outage felt across East Africa
Internet users in Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Uganda have been expressing dissatisfaction with their connectivity, as service providers across East Africa acknowledge ongoing issues.
They have said they are working to fix it.
The spotty service is due to faults in the undersea cables linking the region to the global network, according to industry expert Ben Roberts speaking to the BBC. A similar outage was experienced in parts of West and Southern Africa in March.
Cloudflare Radar, which monitors internet connectivity, said that Tanzania was of the worst-affected countries with traffic falling to 30% of expected levels.
Tanzania’s Citizen newspaper described what has happened as an “internet blackout [that] has affected major network channels”.
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Malawi, Mozambique and Madagascar have also been affected according to Cloudflare Radar.
Roberts, from the pan-Africa company Liquid Intelligent Technologies, said that he 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.
East Africa hit by a major internet outage after two submarine cables that connect South Africa and Kenya experienced faults on Sunday.
The Eassy and Seacom cable systems that run along Africa’s east coast were affected, leading to a nearly total internet blackout in some areas… pic.twitter.com/98icBG1TVX
— Cyprian, Is Nyakundi (@C_NyaKundiH) May 12, 2024
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 centres in South Africa the damage to the vital link that Eassy provides had a big impact.