Liberia, Benin, Ghana and Burkina Faso were heavily affected, according to data from Netblocks, which monitors cybersecurity and the governance of the internet.
The internet infrastructure company Cloudflare said in a post on X that major internet disruption was continuing in the Gambia, Guinea, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Benin and Niger.
Namibia and Lesotho were also affected.
“There seems to be a pattern in the timing of the disruptions, impacting from the north to the south of Africa,” Cloudflare Radar said.
This feels intentional. Not sure if I'm being conspiracy-brained, though.
Burkina Faso
...haven't they been in the news lately? Something about public appropriation?
Network disruptions caused by cable damage have occurred in Africa in recent years. However, today’s disruption “points to something larger [and] this is amongst the most severe,” said Isik Mater, director of research at NetBlocks, a group that documents internet disruptions around the world.
NetBlocks said data transmission and measurement showed a major disruption to international transits, “likely at or near the subsea network cable landing points”.
Wonder what's going on
cuz even less "developed" countries have some level of redundancy with undersea cables.The impact from such cable failures worsens as networks attempt to route around the damage, potentially reducing the capacity available to other countries, said Mater.
“The initial disruption may be a physical cut, but subsequent issues could be of a technical nature,” she added.
I remember when a Pakistani Telcom company routed whole world's youtube traffic through it by accident.
https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2008/02/insecure-routing-redirects-youtube-to-pakistan/
I think what's happening is that there isn't much subsea cable service to this part of Africa. It looks like it's really only ACE, one of the cut cables, that lands in every (non-landlocked) country in western Africa. This would mean that countries that are cut off without another cable landing would have to use some overland routes if they're available, potentially causing degraded service if they become over capacity (which I assume they would since they're probably not meant to be carrying traffic normally going to a subsea cable).
The "at or near a network cable landing" point is interesting, I assume the cables would be closer together there so you would be more likely to hit more than one with an anchor or due to construction or something of that nature.
