Undersea Cable Chaos: South Africa’s Internet Crisis

Why South Africa’s Internet is in Crisis

In March 2024, South Africa faced widespread internet disruptions due to outages in four critical undersea cables: West Africa Cable System (WACS), Africa Coast to Europe (ACE), SAT-3, and Seacom/Tata EGN-Eurasia. These cables, spanning thousands of kilometers, connect South Africa to global servers, enabling everything from cloud services to international communications. The outages, caused by a suspected Houthi attack in the Red Sea and seismic activity off Côte d'Ivoire, led to significant service disruptions, affecting platforms like Microsoft 365, Teams, and Vodacom’s network.

The Seacom outage began on February 24, 2024, in the Red Sea, likely due to a cargo ship, the Rubymar, dropping its anchor during an attack, damaging cables. On March 14, 2024, outages on WACS, ACE, and SAT-3 near Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, caused nationwide connectivity issues. MainOne, a submarine cable operator, ruled out human activity like fishing or drilling, pointing to seismic activity at a depth of 3km as the cause. Repairs are underway but could take weeks to months, with companies like Microsoft and MTN re-routing traffic to mitigate impacts.