News: Seacom cable repairs may take days

A faulty repeater on the Seacom submarine cable system caused huge internet outages nationwide on Monday. Seacom recently announced in a statement that while the repair itself will take only a few hours, the overall process may last a mimimum of 6-8 days.

The problem surfaced just after 11:00 am on Monday morning and affected various ISP's, including Afrihost, Axxess, Mweb and Internet Solutions.

Investigations by Seacom revealed that a repeater had failed on a segment of offshore cable north of Mombasa. They also revealed that this affects traffic towards India and Europe but does not affect traffic within Africa.

Emergency repair procedures have been put in place and a repair ship has been deployed to the location of the fault. While a minimum time of 6-8 days have been given it is unclear as to how long the repairs might take since external factors such as weather conditions may hinder the operation.

International connectivity has been restored for the time being as traffic is routed through alternative systems such as the SAT-3 undersea cable.

As new cable systems such as the East African Submarine System (EASSy) and the Africa Coast to Europe (ACE) comes online over the next 18 months we should be seeing less outages as operators will be able to easily reroute traffic through other cables.

Seacom cable repairs may take days

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