East Africa Internet Blackout from Submarine Cable Cuts
Recent Developments
0112 May 2024: SEACOM and EASSy submarine cables were damaged off the coast of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, disrupting connectivity across East Africa.
0213 May 2024: Cloudflare reported traffic declines of about 10–25% in Kenya, Uganda, Madagascar, and Mozambique, and one-third or more in Rwanda, Malawi, and Tanzania.
033 June 2024: Internet Society reported that all repaired cables were back in service.
Interventions
- Cable repair and restoration of capacity on the affected SEACOM and EASSy routes, completed by 3 June 2024.
- Use of alternative submarine cables, cross-border terrestrial routes, Internet Exchange Points, and local content caches to prevent a total blackout and keep traffic flowing during outages.
What Works
- Network redundancy with multiple submarine cables and terrestrial backhaul reduces the chance that a single cut will cause a total outage, as shown by the fact that no country in the 2024 East Africa incident lost all internet connectivity.
- Local caching and Internet Exchange Points help preserve access to frequently used services when international links fail, which limited the outage to severe slowdown rather than a complete shutdown in the affected countries.
How to Help
- Support organizations working on internet resilience, digital infrastructure, and connectivity policy in Africa, including groups focused on submarine cable resilience and open internet measurement.
- Back local digital access initiatives that expand redundancy, improve rural connectivity, and strengthen emergency communications.
- Advocate for investment in additional submarine and terrestrial links, open-access backhaul, and public resilience planning with telecom regulators and operators.
Make an Impact
Direct donations to verified organizations working on this crisis. Your contribution makes a difference.
Coming soon: one-click donations distributed across all organizations via our impact protocol.
Raise Awareness
Can't donate? You can still make a huge impact. Join others in amplifying this cause globally by sharing it with your network.
Verified Organizations
Organizations Helping(5)
The EIB tackles East Africa's connectivity vulnerability by supporting the policy, financing, and project-structure work behind EASSy. Its role in the stakeholder process was to help brokers, governments, operators, and development institutions establish a workable framework for deploying a regional undersea cable, which increases redundancy and internet capacity across the region.
Telkom Kenya tackles connectivity disruption by operating and hosting submarine cable landing stations and participating in multiple regional cable systems, including EASSy, TEAMS, LION2, PEACE, and DARE1. Its role adds route diversity and landing infrastructure in Mombasa, which helps route traffic around damaged segments and improves overall resilience for regional internet and wholesale telecom services.
WIOCC helps address outages by co-owning and operating regional submarine cable capacity, including through the EASSy ecosystem and other African connectivity systems. Its approach is to expand bandwidth availability and resilience through carrier-grade wholesale infrastructure, which gives local operators alternative routes and access to international capacity. This reduces the impact of single-cable failures on mobile money, education, banking, and other digital services.
AfDB addresses the problem by financing the institutions and infrastructure needed for resilient regional connectivity, including support that helped establish WIOCC as the special purpose vehicle for EASSy. The bank's involvement strengthens the capital base for submarine cable deployment, which expands capacity, lowers vulnerability to outages, and improves access for countries relying on a small number of international links.
