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

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.

Comments

Re:Web Split

[bruce_the_loon]

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 :)