by: Andrea Spinelli Barrile | March 15, 2024
Microsoft has informed customers that repairs to four undersea internet cables, which went offline around midday yesterday, will not occur immediately. Microsoft added that it has redirected data traffic to restore functionality of its cloud platforms in South Africa. By far, there are over 400 million individuals who currently have serious problems connecting to the internet.
In fact, yesterday there was a massive interruption in the Ivory Coast near Abidjan, with a problem with the cables of the West Africa cable system (Wacs), the Africa coast to Europe (Ace), MainOne and Sat-3. It is unclear what caused the disturbance. Microsoft explained that in addition to the problems on the four broken cables in West Africa, the ongoing cable cuts in the Red Sea, involving the Eig, Seacom, Aae-1 cables, are also impacting the overall capacity of the east coast of Africa: “These incidents together have reduced total network capacity for most regions in Africa.”
“Investigations are ongoing on behalf of the owners of the submarine cable systems and we are unable to confirm further details,” a spokesperson for the West Indian Ocean Cable Company (Wiocc), a major player in the African submarine cable industry, told MyBroadband. , whose history began with the launch of the East Coast cable system Eassy, in 2010. Over the last 14 years Wiocc has significantly expanded its operations, to cover more cables and data centers on the continent: “Our goal in this moment is to restore the customers we have by redirecting the traffic of these systems to other submarine systems on which we have capabilities, such as Eassy and Equiano”.
Operators such as Openserve spoke of “cable failures”, confirming the problem and making it known that for them, however, “the impact is limited to customers of IPLC (international private lease circuits) services” as its network has been redirected “to other cable capacity”.
Last night Microsoft assured customers that it would have a partial solution in place to mitigate the outages by midnight and at 10.35pm it announced that “efforts to redirect traffic to healthy infrastructures were successful”. At 1am this evening, Microsoft announced that its analysis indicates that users should no longer encounter service problems and that it would therefore address the issue of cables. However, around 5am this morning, Microsoft said that “we are experiencing delays in repairing West African fiber cables, which prevents resolution of this issue.”
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