The impacted cables include the WACS, MainOne, SAT3 and ACE systems, with the faults said by numerous sources to have occurred somewhere off the coast of Cote D’Ivorie.
The four cables make up the majority of the subsea connectivity in West Africa, with the 2Africa project yet to land in many countries.
Google’s Equiano cable however is being seen as an option for traffic to transverse the West African coast.
“I suspect everyone is trying to get their traffic to Nigeria or South Africa. Equiano only has two important points of presence on the West Coast, one in Nigeria and one in South Africa,” Roderick Beck, global network capacity sourcing at United Cable Company told Capacity.
Beck says in the aftermath of the incident a well known South African carrier immediately sought 500Gs on the Equiano cable.
Seacom, who operate the WACS system, were also reported to be using the Equiano cable, which it went live on in March last year.
The Equiano cable also lands in Lome, Togo and Swakopmund, Namibia. Lanre Kolade, the CEO of CSquared, a digital infraco that runs Equiano's cable landing station Togo said he has seen the capacity provisioned on the cable by his firm increase by 4 times from 100G to 400G.
Côte d'Ivoire was also the country most severely affected by the outage, according to internet watchdog NetBlocks.
⚠️ Update: Metrics show the West and Central #Africa telecoms outage is ongoing, with further declines in connectivity observed to multiple countries through the day; the incident is attributed to cable damage impacting the WACS, MainOne, SAT3 and ACE subsea fiber networks 📉 pic.twitter.com/UW36sKay6J
— NetBlocks (@netblocks) March 14, 2024
All four of the affected cables connect to Cote D’Ivorie’s Abidjan landing station, which is nearby an undersea canyon 1000 metres deep.
It has been speculated that a rockslide or sediment could have damaged the cables in this location, resulting in the internet outages across West and Central Africa.
A number of countries on the West African coast only have access to the ACE (Africa Coast to Europe) system, including The Gambia, Mauritania, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
Issam Yatin, chief operating officer at ZooLabs, the company that manages the cable landing station in Sierra Leone said that while the country is only connected to ACE, its redundancy route logic has restored services.
On the market dynamics of sourcing extra capacity Beck said to Capacity:
“I think some carriers will uptick the price, particularly if they are limited in supply and they do not have alternate use like their own backbone. Others who have a lot like the Chinese carriers will keep prices stable and try offload their huge capacity”.
