Seacom has restored services for most of its customers across Southern Africa and East Africa, it said on Tuesday. This comes four days after several cable systems, including Seacom’s, were cut in the Mediterranean Sea.
The company, whose cable system runs from South Africa to France and India, has augmented its network over the past 36 hours in order to relieve congestion.
“All customers whose services are restored are being contacted directly to advise them of the circuits now in service.”
According to Seacom, work will continue into Monday night to bring further capacity into the network. This is with a view to “completing the restoration of activity as soon as possible”.
The Seacom outage has had a big effect on some South African Internet service providers, including MWeb, which relies on the cable system for international connectivity.
Seacom CEO Mark Simpson said at the weekend that multiple cable systems had been affected by an incident a few kilometres north of the coast of Egypt.
It’s not yet known what caused the cables to be cut, though such cuts are often the result of ships dragging their anchors along the sea bed.
“We suspect, based on our experience with sub-sea systems and the nature of the sea area where the cut has occurred, that the most likely cause is external aggression to the cable most probably caused by a larger vessel dragging its anchor across the sea bed,” Simpson said.
“Unfortunately, this remains a common cause of damage to cable systems globally, despite our continued efforts to protect the cable with armour, burying, notifications to ships of cable location and exclusion zones.”
Simpson said, too, that the process of bringing restoration services online was more complex than expected.
“While we believed we had secured adequate restoration capacity between Egypt and Europe yesterday (Friday) … the physical capability to connect this capacity to our services in Europe is neither adequate nor stable enough,” he said. — (c) 2013 NewsCentral Media