MainOne, a West African data centre and connectivity provider, announced on 15 March, that an internet outage that occurred earlier this week throughout West and Central Africa was due to a rupture in their undersea cable system.

The day before, many subsea cable providers reported breakdowns, causing a severe internet outage throughout West and Central Africa, as reported by the internet observatory Netblocks.
MainOne, a leading provider of submarine cable systems, confirmed that the African internet outage was caused by a subsea cable break.

Why does it matter?

According to Netblocks and Cloudfare, the Ivory Coast experienced a severe outage, while Benin, Burkina Faso, Gambia, Guinea, Liberia, Ghana, and Niger, were all significantly impacted.

MainOne stated that initial investigations have attributed the fault to an external incident, resulting in a cut along the West African coast, offshore Cote d'Ivoire, in the Atlantic Ocean. Given the position and depth of the rupture, human activity's fault was excluded. 'Our preliminary analysis would suggest some form of seismic movement on the seabed led to a break of the cable,' the company said, adding that more data will be available when the cable is recovered during repair.

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