On March 14, 14 African countries, including South Africa, were hit by major internet outages as a result of damage to four submarine fibre optic cables that run from Europe along the West African coastline. This led to disruptions in services including Microsoft Azure.
While this was a significant incident, Ignition Group’s chief technology officer Russell Stather says that the actual outcome was very encouraging: “Cable breakages like this have the potential to be severely disruptive, but South Africa has become far more resilient over the past few years. In this case, there was no disruption to international voice services and all services were restored within just a few hours.”
Russell went on to explain that Google’s Equiano cable system, which came online in August 2022, was unaffected and carriers were able to quickly reroute services to this line.
Source: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/introducing-equiano-a-subsea-cable-from-portugal-to-south-africa
“The Equiano cable has given South Africa an extra level of resilience,” says Russell. “South Africa is now served by a total of 11 undersea cables, the second most in Africa, which gives our internet an extremely high level of dependability. This obviously increases business confidence in the country. It’s also encouraging to see that South Africa is being continually invested in by major companies such as Google.”
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