Africa has been hit by widespread Internet outages.
Extensive system faults have been reported in countries including South Africa, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Benin, Ghana and Burkina Faso.
Services have largely been restored in Liberia and South Africa since outages were first reported on Thursday, March 14, but the cause of the cable failures that led to the blackouts is still not clear – leaving millions of people hit across the continent.
“There seems to be a pattern in the timing of the disruptions, impacting from the north to the south of Africa.” Cloudflare Radar, which provides information on internet connections, told the BBC.
Internet connections in the Ivory Coast was down to around just 4 percent on Thursday morning, according to web connection monitoring service Netblocks.
Liberia dropped to 17 percent connectivity at one point, while Benin was at 14 percent and Ghana 25 percent during the worst of the outages.
Vodacom has said customers were experiencing “intermittent connectivity issues due to multiple undersea cable failures.”
A fault was also reported on the MainOne cable system which serves Nigeria’s commercial hub of Lagos.
Citizens were unable to access the Internet as well as social media across the vast majority of Nigeria, while international bank transfers were also reported to be affected and global voice calls were limited.
“It seems like 50 percent of my life is gone today.” Monrovia-based entrepreneur Benjamin Garkpah told the BBC on Thursday when the issue hit.
The Liberia Telecommunications Authority said the faults were sparked by an incident involving the Africa Coast to Europe submarine communications cable in the Ivory Coast.
