East African countries hit by major internet outage
Monday May 13 2024
Failures affecting the SEACOM and EASSy subsea cable systems disrupted internet connectivity in East Africa. SHUTTERSTOCK
Internet connectivity was disrupted in and around several East African nations on Sunday, the internet observatory Netblocks said, adding that the incident was linked to failures affecting the SEACOM and EASSy subsea cable systems.
Tanzania and the French island of Mayotte were experiencing a high impact on internet connectivity, while Mozambique and Malawi were seeing a medium impact, Netblocks’ said on social media platform X.
Internet firm Cloudflare said on one of its X accounts that monitors trends that internet disruptions were ongoing in Tanzania, Malawi, Mozambique and Madagascar as a result of faults reported on the East African Submarine Cable System (EASSy) and SEACOM cables.
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Nape Nnauye, Tanzania’s minister of information, communication and information technology said in a statement on Sunday the government had been informed by EASSy and SEACOM of disruption to the internet caused by a fault on the cables between Mozambique and South Africa.
“There are ongoing efforts to solve the problem,” he said. “As they continue to solve the problem, we will have very low access to internet and international voice calls.”
Safaricom, Kenya’s biggest telecoms operator, also said in a post on the X platform that it had “activated redundancy measures to minimise service interruption” after it was notified of an outage on the one of cables serving the country.