East Africa hit with widespread internet outages

Tanzania and French Indian Ocean island of Mayotte were hardest hit, the internet surveillance group said

By AFP
May 13, 2024
An image of an internet cable. — Reuters/File
An image of an internet cable. — Reuters/File

NAIROBI: Internet access across several East African countries was disrupted on Sunday due to damaged undersea cables, global web monitor NetBlocks said.

Tanzania and the French Indian Ocean island of Mayotte were the hardest hit, the internet surveillance group said.

“The incident is attributed to failures affecting the SEACOM and EASSy subsea cable systems,” it said on X, formerly Twitter, referring to submarine communications cables that connect the region.

The faults were on cables between Mozambique and South Africa, according to Tanzania´s information and technology minister Nape Nnauye.

Mozambique and Malawi were seeing a medium impact while Burundi, Somalia, Rwanda, Uganda, Comoros and Madagascar had less severe outages, NetBlocks said.