East African Internet Connectivity Impacted by Subsea Cable Cut

(Bloomberg) -- Several nations in East Africa including Kenya are experiencing slow internet connections after at least one subsea cable serving the region was cut.

“The information we do have has confirmed that one of the subsea cables seems cut 45 kilometers north of Durban,” Ben Roberts, group chief technology and and innovation officer at Liquid Intelligent Technologies said. “This is causing the internet to be sluggish.”

The East African region has been affected because some of its large content providers are served by data centers in South Africa, the closest node to Kenya, Roberts said. Internet traffic has been rerouted while engineers resolve the issue, he said. 

“Network data show a disruption to internet connectivity in and around multiple East Africa countries,” internet-analysis firm NetBlocks said in a post on X. 

Damage to four subsea cables off the west coast of Africa disrupted internet services across the continent in March. The West Africa Cable System, MainOne, South Atlantic 3, and ACE sea cables – arteries for telecommunications data – were all affected at the time, triggering outages and connectivity issues for mobile operators and internet service providers, according to data from firms including NetBlocks, Kentik and Cloudflare.

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