Internet Disruption: Nigerian Commission, NCC Confirms Repair Works Ongoing On Undersea Cables

The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has announced ongoing repair efforts on the undersea cable cuts, which caused equipment faults in major undersea cables along the West African Coast last Thursday, resulting in internet service disruptions.

It had earlier reported that the internet outage on Thursday afternoon experienced across the West African countries including Nigeria was said to be as a result of damage to at least three subsea cables in the region.

The West Africa Cable System, MainOne and ACE sea cables — arteries for telecommunications data — were all affected on Thursday, triggering outages and connectivity issues for mobile operators and internet service providers in the region.

MainOne on Friday said that an "external incident" resulted in a cut to its cable system in the Atlantic Ocean, offshore Cote D'Ivoire along the coast of West Africa, ruling out human activity as a cause.

"Our preliminary analysis would suggest some form of seismic activity on the seabed resulted in a break to the cable", MainOne said, adding it would obtain more data when the cable is retrieved during repair.

"Given the distance from land, and the cable depth of about 3 kms (1.86 miles) at the point of fault, any kind of human activity – ship anchors, fishing, drilling etc has been immediately ruled out," Reuters quoted MainOne as saying.

The incident has negatively impacted data and fixed telecom services in several countries of West Africa, including Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, Côte D’Ivoire, among others.

However, the NCC in a statement said that operators of the damaged cables had commenced repairs, noting that internet services were gradually being restored.

“Cable companies – West African Cable System (WACS) and African Coast to Europe (ACE) in the West Coast route from Europe have experienced faults while SAT3 and MainOne have downtime.

“Similar undersea cables providing traffic from Europe to the East Coast of Africa, like Seacom, Europe India Gateway (EIG), Asia-Africa-Europe 1 (AAE1), are said to have been cut at some point around the Red Sea, resulting in degradation of services across on these routes.

“In Nigeria and other West African countries, Internet access and speed have experienced disruptions in the networks of service providers in the affected countries,” the NCC said in the statement.