Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda internet outage: Africa’s vulnerability and how to fix it

A severe internet outage that has hit several African countries – the third disruption in four months – is a stark reminder of how vulnerable the service is on the continent.

Questions are being asked about how the reliability of what has become an essential tool in nearly every aspect of life can be improved.

A cut to two of the undersea cables, which carry the data around the continent, early on Sunday morning, led to the recent disruption.

In March, damage to four cables off the West African coast caused similar problems.

And in February, the vital links were damaged in the Red Sea after the anchor of a stricken ship dragged through three cables.

Investigations are under way into this weekend’s case.

But it was also likely to have been caused by “an anchor drag” from a ship, Prenesh Padayachee, chief digital and operations officer at Seacom, which owns one of the two cables affected, told the BBC.

The second cable, known as Eassy, was affected at the same time and at the same place.

The incident happened off the South African coast, just north of the port city of Durban, according to the Communications Authority of Kenya (CAK).

The capacity of the infrastructure connecting Africa to the rest of the world has improved in recent years and telecoms companies are switching to other cables to maintain the service.

In Kenya, for example, the CAK said that local internet traffic was currently using The East Africa Marine System (Teams) cable that was not affected.

While Kenya has alternatives, other countries, such as Tanzania where connectivity levels hit 30% of what they were expected to be, do not.

The data should be able to find other routes, but when there is a limited number of pathways the service gets jammed and slows down.