On 14 March 2024 four submarine cables off West Africa failed on the same day, at what the Internet Society calls a "single point of failure", and the last of them was not announced as repaired until about 10 May. Thirteen countries felt it. For a SaaS or BPO provider the lesson is that two internet providers are not two routes if their traffic rides the same four cables, and a contract that promises "redundancy" without naming the cable systems says very little.
Key takeaways
- The March 2024 West Africa event damaged ACE, SAT-3/WASC, WACS and MainOne; Cloudflare counted 13 affected countries and the Internet Society reports repairs running to May.
- Exposure varied sharply. Some countries recovered in under an hour or two, others took days to weeks to return to normal traffic levels.
- Cables that were not damaged (Equiano, for one) absorbed rerouted traffic. Diversity helped only where it already existed.
- The Red Sea cuts of February 2024 took about five months to start repairing, because access to Yemeni waters had to be negotiated.
- Ask for the cable systems, the terrestrial paths and a tested failover, not a redundancy statement.
What happened in March 2024
The cause is still described with caution. The Internet Society report on the event cites a "suspected underwater rock slide" off Côte d'Ivoire. TeleGeography wrote on 15 March that the "precise location and cause of all of these faults are not known". MainOne's preliminary view, quoted in coverage of the Nigerian regulator's statement, pointed to seabed seismic activity and ruled out anchors and fishing because the fault lies about 3 km deep.
Cloudflare's measurements show how the failure moved. Beginning about 05:00 UTC the Gambia, Guinea and Liberia lost traffic; Gambia and Guinea came back after roughly 30 minutes and Liberia after more than 12 hours. Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana followed near 07:30. Nigeria, Benin, Cameroon and Togo went down near 10:30, and Namibia and Burkina Faso were also hit. In South Africa, Vodacom saw a significant disruption that was close to normal by 16:00. (The Nigerian Communications Commission's account puts the cut at 07:43 GMT, so onset times differ by source.)
Recovery of traffic and recovery of cables are different clocks. Cloudflare's quarterly summary says Togo, Liberia and Ghana took days, and Ghana's charted disruption runs from 11 to 31 March, with "several weeks" for traffic to return to prior peaks. The cables themselves came back in sequence:
| Cable | Operator or reported repair status | Source | |---|---|---| | SAT-3/WASC | Fully restored as of 6 April | Cloudflare Q1 summary | | ACE | Repairs completed 17 April | Cloudflare Q1 summary | | WACS | Reported repaired in the week to 2 May | Total Telecom teaser, not confirmed by the operator | | MainOne | Completion announced by 10 May | LaunchBase Africa, quoting MainOne's managing director |
Counting from 14 March, the last repair was announced about 57 days later. Forecasts had been tighter: MainOne first estimated about five weeks, then six to eight weeks, and TeleGeography projected 30 to 43 days per cable from earlier West African repairs. The plan was for roughly six weeks and the outcome was closer to eight.
MainOne also declared force majeure, according to the ICIR report. Force majeure clauses can excuse a carrier from penalties, which is one reason a service-level credit is a weak substitute for a second route.
Who was exposed, and why
Fibre geography explains most of the variation. The Internet Society notes that Burkina Faso and Niger have no direct submarine connection and relied on terrestrial links; Niger kept service through Burkina Faso into Benin. Cross-border fibre was "crucial" for the landlocked. Côte d'Ivoire, where all four cables converge, had a near-total outage.
The cables that did not fail carried the load. Seacom's customers were moved automatically onto Google's Equiano, which Cloudflare's quarterly summary reports saw a four-fold traffic increase. TeleGeography listed Equiano, EASSy, Glo-1 and Maroc Telecom's West Africa cable as still online. The Internet Society's Internet Resilience Index scores in the same report run from 26% for Niger to 53% for South Africa; it is a composite, so read its method before leaning on single scores.
Cloud services were not exempt. Microsoft said the cuts reduced capacity supporting its South Africa regions, and, combined with the Red Sea damage, that "all Africa capacity" was affected (as quoted by Cloudflare). The Internet Society reports its EMEA services were restored the same day after rerouting.
The Red Sea, and the east coast
On 24 February 2024 Seacom/Tata, AAE-1 and EIG were damaged in the Red Sea, believed to be from the anchor of the Rubymar, a cargo ship hit by a missile on 18 February. Cloudflare's quarterly summary says East African countries including Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda and Mozambique were reported as affected but Radar observed "no loss of traffic". The slow part was repair. gCaptain reported on 17 July that AAE-1 was back, while Seacom and EIG were still being worked on, about five months after the break, with the delay attributed to "months of negotiations" over access to Yemeni waters. That July date comes from a Yemeni official quoted by Bloomberg, so treat it as reported.
East Africa then had a second event. On 12 May 2024 EASSy and Seacom were cut near Mtunzini in South Africa. Cloudflare's measurement: Kenya, Uganda, Madagascar and Mozambique saw initial drops of 10 to 25%, while Rwanda, Malawi and Tanzania lost a third or more. The Internet Society's Pulse team put Tanzania's national connectivity down nearly 50% on IODA and traffic at its internet exchange down almost 90%. Kenya, Uganda and South Africa fared best, which Pulse attributes to other submarine and terrestrial routes and stronger peering. A repair ship was mobilised and an EASSy representative expected a fix within about two weeks.
A later Red Sea event shows the cloud angle. On 6 September 2025, cuts to the SMW4 and IMEWE systems near Jeddah led Microsoft to warn of "increased latency" for traffic crossing the Middle East, while traffic that avoided the region was unaffected, per Al Jazeera. The consortium behind the 2Africa cable says its core system was completed on 18 November 2025 with landings in at least 17 countries, with the Pearls extension expected in 2026. The page does not say which landings carry commercial traffic, so do not assume a particular route is live.
Our reading: new cables help, but only when your provider has bought capacity on them and your traffic is actually routed there. The strongest counterargument is that more cable systems make a single-event failure like March 2024 less likely to hit everything at once; true, and still no reason to skip the testing.
Buyer guidance
For a provider, route diversity is a list of paths with owners, tested on a schedule. For a buyer, it is the evidence you ask for.
- Ask for the cable systems. Which submarine systems and landing stations do your upstream providers use? Two ISPs on WACS and MainOne are one failure domain.
- Ask for terrestrial paths. Cross-border fibre kept Niger and Burkina Faso online in 2024. Ask which backhaul routes exist and who owns them.
- Check the exchange. Local content stayed reachable where internet exchange points stayed up; ask whether the provider peers locally.
- Ask where the workload runs. Multi-region failover only helps if the second region is reached by a different route. A failover from Johannesburg to a region reached over the same damaged system adds nothing.
- For BPO, ask about agent connectivity: mobile data fallback, home broadband from a different provider, and whether sites can switch to another office. A seat that cannot reach the client's system is an unstaffed seat.
- Read the contract. Look for force majeure language on carrier failure and see whether credits are the only remedy.
- Ask for a drill record. Date of the last failover test, and what failed.
- Treat satellite as a backup. The Internet Society report lists it among backup options; plan it that way, not as the primary route.
If you are building a shortlist, country pages and the SaaS category are a place to compare locations and company profiles, and find a partner sets out how to contact shortlisted companies. None of them reports a company's network paths; that must come from the provider.
Frequently asked questions
How long did the 2024 West Africa outage last? It depended on the country. Gambia and Guinea recovered in about 30 minutes and Liberia in over 12 hours, while Ghana's disruption is charted across 11 to 31 March. The last cable repair was announced about eight weeks after the break.
Which countries were affected? Cloudflare counted 13, from the Gambia to Côte d'Ivoire, plus a large South African network. The Internet Society lists Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Côte d'Ivoire, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Liberia, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, South Africa and Togo.
Does a second internet provider give me redundancy? Only if its traffic uses different cables and landing stations. Ask each provider to name them.
Will 2Africa fix this? It adds capacity and routes if your provider buys on it. The consortium reported its core system complete in November 2025, but the public page does not give a live-service list.
Sources
- Internet Society, 2024 West Africa Submarine Cable Outage Report, 18 April 2024.
- Cloudflare, Undersea cable failures cause Internet disruptions across Africa, March 14, 2024.
- Cloudflare, Q1 2024 Internet disruption summary.
- Cloudflare, East African Internet connectivity again impacted by submarine cable cuts, 13 May 2024.
- TeleGeography, March 2024 West Africa cable faults, 15 March 2024.
- Internet Society Pulse, Internet remains on in Africa despite new cable outages, May 2024.
- ICIR Nigeria, NCC, MainOne confirm undersea cable cut repairs ongoing, 17 March 2024 (reporting the NCC statement of 16 March).
- Osiris, Six semaines au minimum pour réparer le câble sous-marin, 19 March 2024.
- LaunchBase Africa, MainOne restores West Africa connectivity, 10 May 2024.
- Total Telecom, West African subsea cables finally repaired, 2 May 2024.
- gCaptain, Damaged subsea cables repaired in Red Sea, 17 July 2024.
- Al Jazeera, Internet disruptions in Middle East and South Asia after Red Sea cable cuts, 7 September 2025.
- 2Africa consortium, updates, accessed 23 October 2026.
General information about network resilience; it is not engineering, legal or contractual advice.