Multiple Subsea Cable Faults Knock Out Connectivity Across Africa
Internet access was severely disrupted across a large swath of Africa on March 14, 2024, following what appears to be multiple failures of undersea cables off the continent's west coast. The outages began around 05:00 UTC, primarily affecting countries in West and Central Africa, as well as South Africa. In total, 13 African nations, including The Gambia, Côte d'Ivoire, and South Africa, reported connectivity issues.
Data from Cloudflare Radar indicates that the disruptions spread progressively from north to south along the West African coastline. The first signs of trouble emerged south of Senegal, with network interruptions observed in The Gambia, Guinea, and Liberia at approximately 05:00 UTC. While network traffic in The Gambia and Guinea recovered within roughly 30 minutes, Liberia's connectivity remained impaired for over 12 hours.
The next wave of failures hit Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana around 07:30 UTC. A further disruption affected Niger, a landlocked country, at 09:15 UTC, lasting just over two hours. By approximately 10:30 UTC, outages had spread to Nigeria, Benin, Cameroon, and Togo, with Namibia and Burkina Faso also reporting issues. These later disruptions were still ongoing at the time of reporting.
In South Africa, Vodacom's network (AS29975) experienced a significant degradation at roughly the same time. Traffic on this major provider began to recover after 13:30 UTC and appeared to approach normal levels by 16:00 UTC.
Dependence on Submarine Cables Exposed
This cascade of failures highlights the internet's heavy reliance on submarine cables, which carry an estimated 90% of all intercontinental data traffic. With 529 active cables and 1,444 landings stretching roughly 1.3 million kilometers around the globe, even localized damage can have far-reaching consequences. Satellite networks currently handle only a small fraction of general internet usage, leaving most traffic dependent on these undersea links.
The incident echoes previous cable-related outages, from the Tonga disruption to the AAE-1 and SMW5 cable cuts in June 2022.
Network Operators Confirm Faults
Several regional carriers, including South Africa's Vodacom, Nigeria's MTN, and Benin's Celtiis, issued statements referencing multiple submarine cable failures. Microsoft provided more specific details on its Azure status page, reporting that "multiple fiber cables on the West Coast of Africa — WACS, MainOne, SAT3, ACE — have been impacted which reduced total capacity supporting our Regions in South Africa." The company further noted that these new faults, compounded by existing cable cuts in the Red Sea, "has impacted all Africa capacity."
The impact extended beyond cloud services to infrastructure providers themselves. MainOne, the owner of the MainOne submarine cable, saw its corporate website go offline for several hours. DNS for mainone.net relies on name servers within MainOne's own address space, and a portion of the IPv4 range for AS37282 stopped being announced between 07:30 and 15:00 UTC. Once the routing was restored, both the nameservers and the website became reachable again.
The situation has drawn wider attention to the region's cable vulnerabilities, particularly in South Africa where the focus has also turned to operator Seacom. Seacom has been experiencing a service-affecting outage on its cable system in the Red Sea since early March and stated on March 8 that it awaits permits to begin repairs on the damaged segment.
Cloudflare Radar's Outage Center will continue to track the situation as it evolves.
