2024 West Africa Submarine Cable Outage Report – Internet Society

On 14 March 2024, a suspected underwater rock slide off the coast of Cote d’Ivoire resulted in the following submarine cables being offline:
The outage did not directly impact Seacom, whose network spans the East African and South African coastlines. However, due to outages to its partner networks on the West Coast—WACS and MainOne—it had to reroute traffic to other links.
This report focuses on the 14 March 2024 outage, not the outage along the Red Sea that affected Seacom/TGN-EA, EIG, and AAE-1 submarine cables on 24 February 2024. According to an article from 2 April 2024, repairs were still ongoing. There are no reports of the fiber cut on 24 February 2024 causing outages in Africa.
The outage impacted 13 African countries located on the West African seaboard, causing either degraded services or near-total Internet outages.
The following map and table show the countries (shaded red in the map) that were directly affected by the outages on the four submarine cables.
Countries with submarine cable diversity could maintain a level of uptime, indicating resiliency. Cross-border terrestrial fiber links were crucial in facilitating connectivity to operational submarine fiber cables for landlocked countries.
This map shows that all four affected submarine cables converge along the coast of Cote d’Ivoire, where the rockslide is reported to have happened. This can be deemed to be a single point of failure for the four cables.
It is unclear if other single points of failure exist in other countries where the cables converge or whether the cable operators have built-in protection in different areas along their cables. Submarine cable providers do not provide details about their cable routes for what is believed to be security reasons.
It should be noted that cable outages occur occasionally — usually affecting individual cables. Estimates are that there are about 100 fiber cuts a year. This incident is unique because multiple cables were damaged due to their convergence at a single physical point.
Google’s Equiano cable does not terminate in Cote d’Ivoire and was vital to maintaining uptime for several affected countries.
Maroc Telecom West Africa or MoovAfrica’s cable terminates in Cote d’Ivoire but was not affected by the rockslide and remained operational. This shows that they likely used a different path for their fiber cable, which helped Cote d’Ivoire maintain connectivity.
More submarine and terrestrial cables and diverse cable landing points are needed to help improve redundancy and resiliency across Africa.
Several reports indicate that countries with access to Google’s Equiano cable and MTWA/MoovAfrica cables, unaffected by the reported rockslide, could maintain uptime during the outage.
Local operators used cross-border terrestrial fiber links in West Africa to reroute traffic to the Equiano cable, which saw a fourfold increase in traffic.
SEACOM South Africa also rerouted traffic to Google’s Equiano cable to provide traffic to networks that relied on its West African partner network via WACS and MainOne.
Microsoft reported outages of their services in the EMEA region on 14 March. Countries in Africa that were not directly affected by the submarine cable outage could not use services such as Microsoft Teams and Office365, among others. Microsoft services were restored later that day following a successful rerouting by Microsoft.
Niger, which still uses satellite connectivity, was able to maintain uptime over satellite and terrestrial fiber via Burkina Faso into Benin.
Cote d’Ivoire, the center of the outage, experienced a near-total Internet outage. The Moov Africa cable (also known as the Maroc Telecom West Africa or MTWA cable) remained operational and provided connectivity.
The cable operators of the affected submarine cables have provided the below estimates to restore services:
As of publishing, information from affected countries shows that IXPs remained operational, meaning content available via IXPs has remained reachable.
Niger’s IXP is not operational at the moment. As mentioned, available terrestrial fiber and satellite connectivity are believed to have helped avoid the total outage of local and international traffic.
We will share more information about how the IXPs reacted to the incident as it comes to light.
The Internet Society has carried out many activities to support the establishment and/or growth of IXPs in the countries affected by this fiber cut. These activities have included training workshops under the AXIS Project, equipment donations, cache fill grants, and hosting peering forums to strengthen the local IXP community.
Below is a summary of these activities and their respective impacts from the year 2011:
The below map (Figure 2) shows the Internet Society’s IXP support activities in Africa from 2020. These have included:
The following Internet Society Chapters shared various articles and updates on the outage:
Internet Society staff members Jean-Baptiste Millogo and Dr. Dawit Bekele both gave their views on the outage as follows:
Dawit Bekele was interviewed by the French newspaper Jeune Afrique, which is widely read in Francophone Africa. The article provided public awareness of the Internet Society’s Internet measurement project, notably the Pulse Internet Resilience Index. It also discusses the importance of Internet resilience in avoiding the negative impacts of this kind of cable outage. It also denounces some myths, such as the one that says that government control of fiber cables increases Internet resilience.
Jean-Baptiste Millogo was interviewed on BF1 and RTB, two national TV stations in Burkina Faso with regional audiences. During both interviews, he discussed the importance of IXPs, restoration times for damaged submarine cables, how operators and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) provide services, the impact of the outage on Burkina Faso’s Internet ecosystem, and long-term solutions to improve Internet resilience and the impact of future outages in Burkina Faso.
These recent events have shown the importance of having upstream redundancy, whether it be submarine or terrestrial cables, satellite and/or more locally cached content, and IXPs allowing local Internet connectivity to continue when connections to the outside world are broken.
More submarine and regional terrestrial fiber cables are coming live in Africa shortly, including:
Starlink continues to increase availability over Africa. Though licenses have not been granted in all countries, it presents an alternative option to fiber connectivity in the highly diverse region. Hopefully, more affordable LEO satellite services like Starlink will be available shortly to help boost redundancy.
More investment in locally hosted content and Internet services in Africa will also help mitigate the impact of submarine cable cuts. Recent growth in data center investment is a positive sign of more locally available content being made available via IXPs.
2024 West Africa Submarine Cable Outage Report
2024 West Africa Submarine Cable Outage Report
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