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Civil Construction Wipes Out Internet Connectivity Across Africa (thestack.com)

Posted by timothy on from the measure-twice-dig-once dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Submarine cable operator Seacom has announced that civil construction activity was the cause of widespread outages which left large parts of Africa without internet connectivity yesterday. According to the firm, its Northern Trans-Egypt cable was damaged between Cairo and Alexandria, and the Southern Trans-Egypt route was also disrupted outside of Cairo. Adding to the interruption, Seacom's backup route, the West Africa Cable System (WACS), was also down at the same time, leaving most African countries without connectivity.

3 of 61 comments (clear)

  1. Web Split by Ramze · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Wouldn't the proper way of describing this event be something more like "African portion of Internet splits away briefly?" My understanding is that the continent's infrastructure was separated from the rest of the global web, but that doesn't necessarily equal NO internet access. It's entirely possible many in South Africa and other countries barely noticed the disruption.

    If North America's internet connections to other continents went down, we'd likely say that international services "went down" as many of us would still have access to everything we regularly access every day. I'd still be able to access Gmail, Netflix, my online services from most businesses, etc. We wouldn't be writing about how North America's internet "went down."

    1. Re:Web Split by bruce_the_loon · · Score: 4, Interesting

      South African here, we did notice. Big time. The problem is that unlike Europe and America, the big boys don't have datacentres inside the undersea cable boundary. MS is served from Ireland, others from Amsterdam and France as best we can tell. Also a lot of sites under the South African domain use cheaper hosting off-shore.

      There are 4 operational cables linking into South Africa, two on the west side and two on the east and most ISPs get redundancy by purchasing on one on each side. Just happened that a large batch of ISPs had WACS and Seacom as their redundant pair.

      And as for the theories about monitoring installations, Seacom has gone down so many times since it was commissioned that every spy agency in the Universe probably has installed equipment on it, all in Egypt. Must look like a Christmas tree there :)

      --
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  2. calling bull shit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I worked in the middle east, I was in my hotel one night and all of a sudden the internet stopped working and I could no longer do any work, after dicking around with my laptop trying to get the internet working again thinking it was my computer at fault, I finally gave up and called reception who said none of the outside lines or internet is working.

    I went in early to the office to finish the work I was working on before my boss came in, The taxi driver had trouble finding a place to pull up because every van in the country that had a fiber splicer in the back was now parked outside my building with a bunch of poor guys scratching their heads trying to figure out where to begin... I quickly found out that my building and the other building in the country that hosts the diversity of their international links was broken into at the same time that night and the attacker hacked at all the links with a chain saw.
    There was no internet, ATMs and many landline and mobile services did not work that day. The army came in to overtake the repair operations when it was noticed that the palace, bases and airports could not function correctly, and the local telco could not cope with the amount of repair work.
    A meeting took place between military and the telco... (I got kicked out of the meeting room they used to hold the meeting) The army did not want to acknowledge that it was a terrorist attack publicly and the telco obviously did not want to cop the blame in the eyes of their customers and the country, so both parties agreed that the story would be that a configuration error on an "overseas upstream provider" caused the problem. That is how it was reported in the news.

    I still don't understand why they wanted to keep it under wraps....

    TLDR; "CIVIL CONSTRUCTION MY ASS"