A Sudden Internet Disruption Cripples Business Operations In Nigeria, Others

A major Internet disruption hit West and Central Africa, yesterday, the Internet observatory, Netblocks noted, providing reports from operators of multiple subsea cable failures.

Although the cause of the cable failures was not immediately clear, Ivory Coast, Nigeria experienced severe outages, while Liberia, Benin, Ghana and Burkina Faso saw a high impact.

Reuters disclosed that Internet firm, Cloudflare, noted that on one of its X accounts that monitor trends that major Internet disruptions were ongoing in Gambia, Guinea, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Benin and Niger.

Cloudflare Radar said, “There seems to be a pattern in the timing of disruptions, impacting from the north to the south of Africa."

Similarly, the South African telecoms operator, Vodafone blamed connectivity issues on undersea cable failures affecting the country’s network providers.

However, it was revealed that the outage in Nigeria was as a result of fibre cut in Ghana. Specifically, it was gathered that MainOne Ghana suffered a fibre cut, which led to Internet service disruption in Nigeria and environs.

Sources within the InfraCo confirmed that banks and subscribers of some network operators in Nigeria have experienced Internet downtime for the majority of yesterday.

Thinking back, some weeks ago, the telecommunications firm, MTN also suffered fibre cuts, which caused its customers to experience hitches accessing the Internet.

According to MTN, “Our customers have been experiencing challenges connecting to the network due to major service outages caused by multiple fibre cuts, affecting voice and data services.

“Our engineers are working hard to resolve it with services gradually being restored in some areas.” Yesterday as well, a statement from Bayobab Group also revealed that it suffered connectivity disruptions due to undersea cable damage, which resulted in connectivity issues in several West African countries.

Bayobab, a subsidiary of MTN, noted that in recognition of the critical importance of consistent Internet and communication services: “we are fully committed to swiftly addressing these disruptions.

“To mitigate the impact on our customers in the affected countries, our operations are actively working to reroute traffic through alternative network paths and engaging with our consortium partners to expedite the repair process for the damaged cables. Leveraging our robust and resilient network infrastructure, we aim to maintain service interruptions and maintain connectivity.”