2024 East Africa Submarine Cable Outage Report
By Internet Society
July 23, 2024
On 12 May 2024, two fiber optic submarine cables—SEACOM and EASSy—were damaged off the coast of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, significantly reducing Internet connectivity in multiple East African countries. The cause of the damage is a suspected dragging ship anchor, a common source of submarine cable cuts.
All cables were repaired as of 3 June 2024—approximately three weeks after the initial damage.
This report highlights the impact of these submarine cable cuts on local connectivity and the importance of developing resilience to maintain an acceptable level of service in the face of such faults.
The Importance of Submarine Cables
Fibre optic submarine cables are critical communication infrastructures that form the backbone of international Internet connectivity. Currently, around 559 submarine cable systems span 1.5 million kilometers, connecting the smallest Pacific islands to the largest economies of Africa, Asia, and the Americas.
In 2009, the first submarine fiber cables were activated on East Africa’s coast, providing an alternative to satellite connectivity to many countries in the sub-region. Not only did these cables reduce latency in the sub-region by 400%, but they also reduced Internet costs by more than 50%—at the time, one megabit per second (Mbps) of satellite capacity cost roughly USD 2,000 per month or higher.
Since then, five more submarine fiber cables have been commissioned to connect East African countries south of Kenya (Figure 1).
While these submarine cables predominantly benefit the countries that connect directly to them via coastal landing stations, neighboring landlocked countries also benefit via terrestrial cross-border fiber connections. For example, a terrestrial cross-border fiber cable connecting Kampala, Uganda, to the landing station in Mombasa, Kenya, delivers submarine capacity to Uganda, helping to reduce costs and latency.
Table 1 shows the submarine cables and terrestrial cross-border cables that provide connectivity to each country in the sub-region.
