Cable repair ship mobilised as massive Internet outage continues

MTN Group’s Bayobab network services provider has said that the WACS and ACE consortiums have jointly mobilised a cable ship for repair while investigations into the cause of the outage continue.

The West Africa Cable System (WACS), the Africa Coast to Europe (ACE), MainOne, and SAT–3 all experienced outages at around 12:30 on Thursday.

“MTN Group’s Bayobab is working with its partners on the coordination of repair work to damaged underwater digital communication cables along the West Coast of Africa,” the company stated.

“While investigation and repair efforts are underway, Bayobab’s strategy focuses on successfully rerouting traffic, leveraging our extensive network, and collaborating with industry partners.”

Bayobab said it was also working with the cable consortiums and partners to enhance interconnection along the west and east coasts of Africa.

It aims to do this with further interconnections between WACS and Google’s Equiano cable, and by introducing an end-to-end connection between WACS on the west coast and EASSy on the east coast.

Bayobab’s announcement comes after news emerged that a roadworks mishap near the Abidjan airport in Côte d’Ivoire could be why the four undersea telecommunications cables went offline around the same time.

Citing a source who asked not to be identified, the African Press Agency reported that a roadworks company was performing construction along Boulevard Valéry Giscard d’Estaing — the main road connecting Abidjan’s airport to the city proper.

According to the report, the cable cut happened along the road in the direction of Port-Bouët, a seaside suburb of Abidjan.

Network operators declined to confirm or deny whether a roadworks mishap was the root cause of the issue, stating that investigations were still ongoing.

The outage caused severe knock-on effects, with Microsoft’s cloud region in South Africa going offline and Vodacom’s data network becoming unavailable for many subscribers.

In South Africa, Vodacom was able to restore services within an hour or so on Thursday, while Microsoft’s cloud platforms only started coming back online at around midnight.

The Microsoft outage caused severe disruptions as many organisations were unable to access their e-mail or conduct meetings over Teams.

Those relying on Microsoft’s cloud region in South Africa were also severely impacted.

Payments provider Yoco uses Microsoft Azure and said its services were disrupted as a result of the outage.

In the meantime, Microsoft has mitigated the issue by rerouting traffic and expanding its capacity in South Africa.

“Many of the Azure Services that were affected by this issue earlier have now returned to normal functionality,” Microsoft has stated.

“We are validating for any remaining impacted services, however customers should notice considerable improvements.”

Microsoft said it had hoped to have fully mitigated the issue by 16:00 on Friday, but experienced delays.

“We are currently facing technical issues with capacity activation, and these need to be resolved before we can safely pull this into the network,” it said.

Microsoft said it expects to complete the mitigation by 20:00 on Friday.

The outage in West Africa was compounded by ongoing cable cuts in the Red Sea on Seacom, EIG, and AAE–1.

A Houthi attack was blamed for the cable breaks, as rebels shot Belizian fertiliser ship The Rubymar with ballistic missiles off the west coast of Yemen in mid-February.

It is believed the ship dropped an anchor, which was dragged along the seafloor as it drifted after the crew abandoned the vessel.

“These incidents together had reduced the total network capacity for most of Africa’s regions,” Microsoft said.