The internet outages on Thursday afternoon experienced across the West African countries including Nigeria have been said to be as a result of damage to at least three subsea cables in the region.
The West Africa Cable System, MainOne and ACE sea cables — arteries for telecommunications data — were all affected on Thursday, triggering outages and connectivity issues for mobile operators and internet service providers in the region.
Data provided by internet analysis firms including NetBlocks, Kentik and Cloudflare confirmed this development but the cause of the cable faults has not yet been determined.
MTN has also confirmed the outage saying it was from the damage of the cables and engineers were swiftly working on remedying the situation.
Meanwhile, In February, SaharaReporters reported how MTN confirmed it suffered a glitch that affected its services across Nigeria.
The telecom blamed the service outage on multiple fibre cuts which affected voice and data services.
Many of its customers also lamented difficulty making calls or using the internet during that time.
In a statement published on social media, the telecommunications provider had said: “You have been experiencing challenges connecting to the network due to a major service outage caused by multiple fibre cuts, affecting voice and data services.
“Our engineers are working hard to resolve with services gradually being restored in some areas.
“We apologise for the inconvenience and ask for your patience and understanding as the team works to restore full service as soon as possible.”
