A disruption to internet connectivity was reported across several East African countries on Sunday, due to faults in the East African Submarine Cable System (EASSy) and SEACOM cables.
According to internet monitoring groups NetBlocks and Cloudflare, the outages affected Tanzania and the French Island of Mayotte the most, with Mozambique and Malawi experiencing moderate disruptions.
Safaricom, Kenya’s largest telecom operator, responded quickly by activating redundancy measures to ensure continued service, although with expected reductions in internet speeds.
Excitingly, the company is working to fully restore the cables and mitigate the impact on its customers.
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The incident follows a series of outages in March that affected various West African countries and South Africa, causing disruptions to digital communication and business operations.
Recall that those outages were caused by damages to four sub-sea cables off the west coast of Africa.
Checks disclosed that the repair costs for such damages can be extreme, with estimates ranging from $1 million to $2 million per cable, depending on the extent of the damage.
The collective repair costs for the four affected cables in March could reach around $8 million, according to Chris Wood, CEO of the West Indian Ocean Cable Company.
