08 November 2019

Seacom’s submarine cable system briefly experienced what the firm described as “a service-affecting outage” in late October. 

The business, which launched Africa’s first broadband submarine cable system along the continent’s eastern and southern coasts back in 2009, published news of the outage in a series of tweets, beginning with the news that it was experiencing a service-affecting outage on its subsea cable system between Mombasa in Kenya and Zafarana in Egypt.

“All linear transmission traffic on the Seacom subsea cable system on the east coast of Africa, to and from Europe, is affected,” it added. 

Seacom announced the outage at 10pm GMT on October 22, noting that customers with IP or other managed network services terminating between Dar es Salaam and South Africa would remain unaffected.

However, they “could experience a slight increase in latency as traffic is routed over Seacom’s West Coast transmission links”. 

The company announced at noon the next day that the service was back to normal.

“We are still investigating the cause of the outage and will provide necessary updates as we have more information,” it said. However, it remains unclear as to what caused the problems.