Work was under way on Thursday to repair the Eassy submarine cable that was damaged off the coast of KwaZulu-Natal last week.
Simultaneous breaks affecting Eassy and the Seacom system off the KZN coast — east of the mouth of the Tugela River — resulted in widespread internet disruptions across East Africa, with Kenya, Rwanda and Tanzania particularly hard hit by the incident.
Although it’s not yet known what caused the cables to break, Wiocc Group, which is an investor in Eassy, said the damage to the cable was “consistent with a heavy object (or objects) being dragged over it”. This suggests the damage may have been caused by a ship’s anchor, though Wiocc said only that no clear cause had been identified.
Orange Marine’s cable-laying ship, the Léon Thévenin, is currently at the site of the damaged cables. It set sail from Cape Town on 14 May to attend to the problem, which occurred on Sunday, 12 May.
“The Eassy repair is currently in progress and traffic is expected to be restored by tomorrow morning,” a spokesman for Wiocc told TechCentral on Thursday.
Seacom said the Léon Thévenin will attend to the repair to the Seacom cable on Friday.
The company confirmed it “experienced a subsea cable fault near Mtunzini in South Africa on 12 May 2024 impacting services transiting South Africa towards Mozambique, and Tanzania”.
Rotten luck
“The connectivity to Tanzania and Mozambique has been restored back to operations. The activation of the additional capacity was done in a record time of two days, a process that normally takes weeks to complete. The Seacom network in Kenya and Uganda remains unaffected by this outage and the South African traffic is being routed via the west coast cable systems. Our priority is to ensure that the network remains operational and stable”, Seacom told TechCentral in e-mailed response to questions.
“We have started the process of repairing the cable system. We are actively perusing a repair operation in conjunction with Eassy, due to the proximity of the South African-based cable repair ship to the outage location,” the company added.
Africa has had a run of rotten luck with subsea internet cables this year.
In February, a stricken vessel dragged its anchor through three cables in the Red Sea – including the Seacom system – impacting connectivity in the region. Those cables still haven’t been repaired due the geopolitical instability in the region.
Then, in March, a seismic event under the ocean off Ivory Coast severed four cables simultaneously, causing internet disruptions in West Africa and as far south as South Africa. Those cables have since been repaired, TechCentral reported. – © 2024 NewsCentral Media
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