Large parts of East Africa were hit with internet disruptions on Sunday, leaving many users struggling to connect. The outage, according to internet observatory Netblocks, stemmed from failures affecting two critical subsea cable systems: SEACOM and EASSy.
Tanzania and the French island of Mayotte bore the brunt of the disruption, experiencing significant internet connectivity issues. Other countries, including Mozambique and Malawi, faced moderate internet slowdowns.
Netblocks, along with internet security firm Cloudflare, confirmed the disruptions were linked to faults on the EASSy and SEACOM cables, which connect East Africa to the global internet.
Nape Nnauye, Tanzania’s Minister of Information, Communication, and Information Technology, issued a statement acknowledging the outage and its cause – a fault on the cables between Mozambique and South Africa. He assured citizens that efforts were underway to rectify the issue, but warned of limited internet access and international call connectivity in the meantime.
Kenya, while not as severely affected, also felt the pinch of the outage. Safaricom, the country’s leading telecoms operator, took steps to minimize service interruptions by activating backup measures. However, the company did caution users about potential slowdowns.
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