Widespread internet disruptions throughout East and Southern Africa reported

Significant internet disruptions have been reported across East and Southern Africa, according to both Netblocks and Cloudflare. Netblocks, an internet observatory, noted that internet connectivity faltered in several nations in these regions on Sunday, citing issues with the SEACOM and EASSy subsea cable systems as the root cause.

Tanzania and the island of Mayotte were particularly hard-hit by the connectivity woes, with Mozambique and Malawi also experiencing notable impacts, as per Netblocks.

Cloudflare, another internet service provider, confirmed ongoing disruptions in Tanzania, Malawi, Mozambique, and Madagascar through one of its monitoring accounts. These disruptions were attributed to faults reported on the East African Submarine Cable System (EASSy) and SEACOM cables.

Nape Nnauye, Tanzania’s minister of information, communication, and information technology, acknowledged the situation, stating that the government had been alerted by EASSy and SEACOM about the internet disruption caused by a cable fault between Mozambique and South Africa. Efforts were underway to resolve the issue, though he cautioned that internet access and international voice calls would likely remain severely affected until a resolution was found.

Safaricom, Kenya’s leading telecoms operator, took proactive measures to mitigate service interruptions after being notified of a cable outage affecting the country.

This incident follows a similar outage in March that affected parts of West and Southern Africa, including countries like South Africa, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Benin, Ghana, Sierra Leone, and Burkina Faso. Those outages were attributed to damages sustained by the MainOne and ACE sea cables.