March 2024 | Here's what's happened in the last month.
African Internet Outage Could Have Been A Lot Worse
On 14 March, the Internet connectivity across 12 countries in Western and Southern Africa was variably limited due to damage to four submarine cables. This came as the continent was also dealing with three submarine cable cuts in the Red Sea, compounding the already low capacity of the region.
Although the cause of the damage to the affected ACE, SAT-3/WASC, MainOne, and WACS cables has not been confirmed, many are reporting that it could have been caused by an underwater landslide in a trench, slightly west of the Abidjan branch, that the cables were all laid through. Two repair ships are on their way to fix the cuts, with reports that connectivity via the cables will not be fully restored for up to a month.
While there has been a lot of commentary about how these recent incidents expose Africa's lack of Internet resilience (which is 35% per the Pulse Internet Resilience Index), it is worth recognizing the work that the African Internet community has done in recent years to increase infrastructure and capacity development that helped it maintain and restore partial Internet connectivity.
Since 2010, Africa has significantly increased its submarine cable connectivity. Based on analysis by Steve Song, the number of subsea cables connecting the continent since 2010 has increased from 6 to 26 (see figures below)!
In terms of capacity development, the best example of this was the work done by CSquared, which manages the unaffected Equiano cable that serves Togo. According to CSquared's CEO, their team increased its capacity by x4 and worked with carriers across Africa to address the outages, including providing capacity across its terrestrial cross-border fiber network with Ghana and Benin.
Instances like these highlight the importance of interconnectivity and community and go a long way to developing human resilience, which the Internet is also reliant on and can be hard to appreciate via data.
Thanks to all that took our Pulse user survey. To give a quick review of the results:
The majority of respondants are using Pulse as an information source, with 52% of respondents having used data from it for their work and research.
The Internet Resilience Index, Pulse Country Reports, Internet Shutdown Tracker, and Pulse Blog were deemed the most valuable features.
New feature and metrics requests include breakdown of demographic accessing networks, impact of shutdowns on different demographics, more detailed reports on reasons for Internet shutdowns, climate change impacts, and analysis on small and large-scale Internet outages.
Congratulations also to Nita Bhalla who was randomly chosen as winner of the e-gift card.
Stay tuned for new features that we are working on based on your feedback.
