The entire East Coast of Africa region experienced a major network outage on Tuesday night and partly on Wednesday. This is after Africa's lead undersea fibre-optic cable service provider, Seacom announced experiencing connectivity failure since Tuesday 22 October 2019 at 22:00 GMT.
The cable service providers in a statement on Wednesday morning stated that the infrastructure on which the subsea cable system operates was having problems between Mombasa, Kenya and Zafarana in Egypt.
"Seacom is experiencing a service-affecting outage on its subsea cable system between Mombasa and Zafarana. All linear transmission traffic on the Seacom subsea cable system on the East Coast of Africa, to and from Europe are affected." the service provider's statement reads in part.
The entire East Coast of Africa region will be affected by the outage [Source/Conceptdraw.com]
The area between Dar es Salaam and South Africa will during the outage rely on the West Coast transmission links but users might experience a slight increase in latency.
This means that there will be major delays in data communication over the network for users in the areas that will be routed to the West Coast transmission.
It is not yet clear how long the firm will take before resolving the problem that has already affected leading internet providers in Mombasa and Nairobi.
"Customers with IP or other managed network services terminating between Dar es Salaam and South Africa will remain unaffected but could experience a slight increase in latency as traffic is routed over SEACOM's West Coast transmission links," Seacom stated in a statement released on its Twitter handle.
Seacom restored their services on Wednesday afternoon.