Seacom, a submarine cable operator has announced that civil construction activity in Egypt was the cause of prevalent outages which recently left, particularly South Africa without internet connectivity.
Prior to the outage, Seacom had been in the news earlier in the week for its new partnership with network provider Ciena. The deal promises to deliver improved reach and increased capacity for local providers.
Seacom’s Northern Trans-Egypt cable was damaged between Alexandria and Cairo, and the Southern Trans-Egypt route was also disrupted outside of Cairo.
Adding to the interruption the West Africa Cable System (WACS), Seacom’s backup route was also down, leaving most African countries without connectivity.
The company’s submarine and terrestrial networks connect Africa to Europe, Asia and the Middle East, spanning across 17,000km. The system uses bundled backhaul, open access points of presence and global partnerships to run its continuous and extensive connectivity services for African network operators.
Seacom released the following statement, immediately after sending in their repair teams to investigate the damage: “The Seacom terrestrial network was successfully repaired on the 21st January 2016 at 16:46 GMT. Seacom would like to take this opportunity to thank all of our customers, partners and peers for their collaboration and support during the outage.
We were able to route Internet traffic through India during the two hours and 40 minutes that Seacom experienced a dual failure across Egypt”
Seacom however added that with the west coast outage also coinciding with the Egypt outage “international connectivity at many of these service providers failed or was degraded” while the faults in Egypt were being repaired.
The two companies are set to offer new network solutions with a 100Gbps upgrade to African service providers, with a link to main points of presence in Europe via undersea routes.
