Seacom said at the weekend that an outage is affecting services to some clients.
The problem, on segment 15 of the Seacom submarine cable system, is located slightly west of Djibouti in the Red Sea and occurred on 8 April at about 9pm South African time.
“The impact of the incident is that all linear transmission traffic on the east coast of Africa to and from Europe will be affected,” the company said in a statement posted on its website on Sunday evening.
“Customers with [Internet protocol] or other managed network services will remain unaffected but could experience higher latencies with possible degradation of service, as traffic will predominantly be routed over Seacom’s Wacs transmission links on the west coast of Africa, as well as on Seacom’s network to Asia gateways.”
Wacs is the West Africa Cable System, which runs from a landing station near Cape Town to London along a westerly route. Seacom’s cable runs along Africa’s east coast, between a site north of Durban to Marseilles in France, via the Red Sea.
Seacom said its repair vessel is “being mobilised and a tentative repair date will be confirmed soon”.
“Seacom continues to monitor the situation closely and will provide necessary updates as warranted,” it said. — (c) 2017 NewsCentral Media
