Substantial damage to no fewer three subsea cables off the West Coast of Africa on Thursday left internet services in Nigeria, Ghana and other countries across the continent in jeopardy, Africa Today News, New York reports.
Telecommunications subscribers and bank users were stranded for hours as the disruption practically paralysed digital transations and internet communications.
According to one of the world’s leading financial news organisations, Bloomberg, the West Africa Cable System, MainOne and ACE sea cables — arteries for telecommunications data — were all affected on Thursday.
According to data from internet analysis firms including NetBlocks, Kentik and Cloudflare, the cut triggered outages and connectivity issues for mobile operators and internet service providers across the West African sub-region.
The cause of the cable faults has not yet been determined as of press time but in a statement, telecommunications company, MTN Nigeria, explained that the network outage experienced by its subscribers was as a “result of damage to international undersea cables across East & West Africa”.
Read Also: Ghana’s Finance Ministry Warns Against Anti-LGBTQ+ Bill
“The repair process is ongoing to resolve the situation as soon as possible. Please look out for further updates,” the company said.
The company had also linked network outage experienced by its subscribers for the major part of February 28, 2024 on “multiple fibre cuts”.
MTN boasts of 87,038,768 subscribers as of December 2023, according to data by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), representing 38.79% of the total market share, the highest in the country by any licensed Mobile Network Operator (MNO).
The 87 million subscribers of the MNO experienced difficulty making and receiving calls for hours on Wednesday, fuelling rumours that the NCC had made do its threat that all telcos bar subscribers not linked to the National Identification Numbers (NIN), with February 28, 2024 as deadline.
Many subscribers were stranded with some persons visiting MTN offices nearest to them to get explanations.