Not again: SA internet disruption caused by new cable fault days after old ones fixed

• A fault on two subsea cables on the east coast of the continent caused an internet disruption in South Africa on Sunday.
• This comes days after all the subsea cables on the west coast of Africa have been repaired.
• The fault impacted several countries more than South Africa.
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Internet services were disrupted in South Africa and a host of countries on the east coast of the continent, as two subsea internet cables experienced a fault at the same time on Sunday.

This was confirmed by Ben Roberts, the group CTIO at Liquid Intelligent Technologies, who confirmed in a post on X on Sunday afternoon that the Seacom and EASSy Cables were reporting faults that occurred at the same time.

According to a BBC report, the fault occurred 45 kilometres north of Durban and sabotage has been ruled out as a cause at this stage.

The fault resulted in a spike in outage reports on the network problem reporting site Downdetector. Netflix, DStv, Telkom, Vumatel and a few other service providers had a clear spike in outage reports on the site starting at around 16:00 on 12 May which subsided by around 22:00 that evening. 

Downdetector does not offer its reporting services in East African countries, but Netblocks a different internet disruption reporting company showed that there was a high incident impact in Tanzania and Mayotte, and a medium rating in Mozambique and Malawi from the Seacom cable break.

The Seacom cable was already damaged in the Red Sea in February this year, and repair work is believed to have been complicated by the political instability in the region. But, it still would have been possible to run traffic through the unaffected portion of the cable, meaning South Africa could connect to East African countries.

Subsea cables allow for the rapid transfer of information across long distances that make it possible for the internet to function. When a cable is damaged, all of the traffic that would have run along that cable needs to be re-routed to another cable. 

In some areas though, there are not many cables that connect the country to the world, meaning the impact of a service breakdown can be severe.

The cable damage on the east coast didn’t cause nearly as big of a spike in outage reports in South Africa as when four subsea cables snapped on the west coast of the continent at the start of March.

READ MORE | It’s not just you - huge internet outage hits South Africa as multiple undersea cables snap

Almost all internet services were dramatically impacted for a few hours on 14 March as a result of the fault, which likely occurred as a result of seismic activity.

Bayobab, MTN’s infrastructure division, told News24 on Friday that it could confirm that the ACE, WACS, and SAT-3 cables had been repaired and were fully operational. MainOne, also confirmed that its subsea cable had been repaired on Friday.

This means that repair work on all affected West Coast cables finished just days before the new fault on the East Coast.

The cause of the fault on the East Coast cables has not been announced yet, and the expected repair timeline has not been disclosed.