Internet outage — roadworks blunder ruled out as root cause

Network infrastructure company WIOCC has confirmed that roadworks in Abidjan are unrelated to the submarine cable outages off the coast of Cote d’Ivoire.

“These roadworks are scheduled works that started before the cable cuts were noted, and as such, they have not contributed to the outages experienced along Africa’s west coast and in South Africa,” said WIOCC group chief marketing officer Mike Last.

“We continue to await confirmation on the cause of the outages affecting multiple subsea systems.”

WIOCC’s confirmation comes after a Senegal-based African newswire reported that a roadworks mishap in Abidjan caused the outages.

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

These outages caused major Internet disruptions across the continent, including South Africa.

Microsoft’s cloud region in South Africa went offline, and Vodacom’s data network became unavailable for many subscribers.

In South Africa, Vodacom restored 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 could not 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 due to the outage.

Microsoft noted that cable cuts in the Red Sea — Seacom, EIG, and AAE–1 — also impacted overall capacity on the East coast of Africa.

A Houthi attack was blamed for these East coast 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.

“This resulted in downstream impact to dependent Azure services, which may have experienced degradation and availability issues.”

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

“As the capacity headroom issue within the network has been addressed, we anticipate a reduction in the number of issues experienced by our customers.”

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 continue.

“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.

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 the introduction of an end-to-end connection between WACS on the west coast and EASSy on the east coast.

WIOCC said it has activated an unprecedented amount of capacity across unaffected cables.

“Immediately the four subsea cables were severed off the coast of Cote d’Ivoire, our engineering, operations and field teams swung into action,” said WIOCC group CEO Chris Wood.

“They have been working tirelessly for the last 48 hours with our strategic network partners and equipment suppliers”.

Wood said that within the next 24 hours, their team will have activated an additional 2Tbps of capacity across the unaffected cables in their network.

This is to support the capacity needs of other network operators and hyperscalers, Wood said.