West, Central Africa in internet outage after undersea cable failure

Millions of internet users in Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia, Benin, Ghana and Burkina Faso were frustrated after an outage that was blamed on undersea cables failures.

The African subsea cable operator Seacom confirmed that services on its west African cable system were down and that customers who relied on that cable were being redirected to the Google Equiano cable, which Seacom uses.

Internet connectivity in Côte d’Ivoire was down to around just 4% on Thursday morning, according to Netblocks, which tracks cybersecurity and internet connectivity.

Liberia at one point dropped to 17% while Benin was at 14% and Ghana 25%, Netblocks said.

In South Africa, Vodacom on Thursday said that customers were “experiencing intermittent connectivity issues due to multiple undersea cable failures.”

The outage disrupted economic activity that rely on the internet, including international bank transfers.

The internet infrastructure company Cloudflare said in a post on X that major internet disruption was continuing in the Gambia, Guinea, Liberia, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Benin and Niger. Namibia and Lesotho were also affected.