Central, West & Parts of Southern Africa Without Internet Access

Thursday, 14 March 202

By: TB Obwoge 

I was wondering why I wasn't getting replies, most of the people I converse with are from West African countries. When I asked for one person to make a mobile money payment on one of my bills that is due in the country that he's in, nothing. Crickets. I thought perhaps he was ignoring me, when I noticed the message wasn't delivered. 

I tries someone else, the same thing, even my TikTok videos weren't getting as many views as they used to. Now TikTok I pushed off as shadow banning, however today's supposed to be the birthday of Burkina Faso's interim President Captain Ibrahim Traoré. 

When I post my (many) videos directed towards either Burkina athletes are on independence day, I usually get several views & likes on those videos. Again nothing big, until some of the news sources weren't current, I was sent a few WhatsApp message about the delays, this is what I learned which is concerning. 

Much of west and central Africa without internet after undersea cable failures

Ivory Coast, Liberia, Benin, Ghana and Burkina Faso among countries experiencing outages.

Much of west and central Africa has been left without internet service, as operators of several subsea cables reported failures.

The cause of the cable failures on Thursday was not immediately clear.

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.

"The redirection happens automatically when a route is impacted," it said by email.

Network disruptions caused by cable damage have occurred in Africa in recent years. However, today's disruption "points to something larger [and] this is amongst the most severe," said Isik Mater, director of research at NetBlocks, a group that documents internet disruptions around the world.

NetBlocks said data transmission and measurement showed a major disruption to international transits, "likely at or near the subsea network cable landing points".

At least a dozen countries have been affected by the outage, and there were fears of disruption of essential services in worst-hit states such as Ivory Coast, where the disruption was severe.

Africa has a higher proportion of its internet traffic on mobile devices than any other continent, with many of its businesses relying on the internet to deliver services to their customers.

Liberia, Benin, Ghana and Burkina Faso were heavily affected, according to data from Netblocks, which monitors cybersecurity and the governance of the internet.

The internet infrastructure company Cloudflare said in a post on X that major internet disruption was continuing in the Gambia, Guinea, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Benin and Niger. Namibia and Lesotho were also affected."There seems to be a pattern in the timing of the disruptions, impacting from the north to the south of Africa," Cloudflare Radar said.

Source The Guardian

Issues that "data" WiFi outages bring:

1) Mobile money is where items are paid for and purchased via a mobile wallet on the cellphone of the users. When there is no network then a person can't make purchases and at times this means they can't pull the money from their phones in order to get octual physical cash.

2) Sadly many of the countries in West and Central African countries aren't fully digitalised at this time. If they were this outage would have effected more areas of use.

3) Communication, some people only have apps like Telegram, or WhatsApp, to connect with one another, there are millions without access to the internet in large areas of the continent. Due to either instability or just lack of a device.

4) Some of the countries are dealing with huge issues which involve stabilty within the countries government. Senegal and Burkina Faso to name the top two. Ghana which is heading to elections later this year is also a country to watch out for closely, as issues with crime are on the rise there.

Thank you for reading 🙏🏽 Please consider buying a coffee for Lacey’s House efforts in Gender Equality & Children’s Rights as it tries to move international.

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