Africa: Possible subsea cable damage linked to outage spike in West Africa

Outages are being reported along the western coast of Africa after a possible cable damage incident. Reports from MyBroadband have linked this downtime to multiple outages on undersea cables near Abidjan in Côte d’Ivoire.

Microsoft is reporting network latency issues in its South Africa North and South Africa West locations. The company said, “Starting at 10:30 UTC on 14 Mar 2024, customers using Azure Services in South Africa North and South Africa West may experience increased network latency or packet drops when accessing their resources.”

"We have determined 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," Microsoft said in an update. "In addition to these cable impacts, the on-going cable cuts in the Red Sea — EIG, Seacom, AAE-1 — are also impacting capacity on the East Coast of Africa. This combination of incidents has impacted all Africa capacity – including other Cloud providers and public Internet as well."