Nine countries in East Africa were deprived of Internet

Nine countries in East Africa were deprived of Internet after few incidents. A technical issue occured and paralyse communication in Zimbabwe and Djibouti. A boat in Mombasa dig out optical fiber shuting down 3 days ago internet trafic in the East area of Africa, according to “East African Marine System” (TEAMS).

The East African Marine System apologized for the inconvenience and told that it will take about 3 weeks to resolve the issue. To minimize the impact, the TEAMS will change the path of the trafic.We can list three other incidents the last two weeks. In facts, the same kind of accident occured. Three cables were digged out in the red sea. These cable are used to link Middle-East and Djibouti. During this outage, Kenya depended, in terms of Internet access, only on one optical fiber with only one internet access provider: Safaricom. Safaricom manage more than 80% of the Internet trafic in Kenya and the half of the trafic go through TEAMS cables.

Since the incident, the company announced that all the trafic moved to other path including submarines cables of “Seacom“. SEACOM is a privately owned and operated pan-African ICT enabler that is driving the development of the African internet.

The trafic still slow down by 20% in nine country.